


The Genius of Yarthe (and Other Dopes)

by MotherInLore



Series: So, I Guess my Muse wants Marvel, now... [12]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Witches of Karres - James H. Schmitz
Genre: BAMF Leewit, Could be Pre-Slash if you squint, Crossover, Fish out of Water, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Gratuitous Space travel, Hand-wavey Magic, Hand-wavey Science, I see your Infinity War and I raise you a Leewit and a Vatch, I would argue that the Leewit is even more of a Mary Sue in canon., IN SPACE!, Mild spoilers for the two Karres sequels, Some Humor, Teamwork, This is coming out more Loki-centric than intended. Oh well., Time Travel, Vatches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:34:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 40
Words: 110,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25230217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: A time traveler manifests abruptly in Avengers compound and starts causing trouble immediately.  Lengthy (and increasingly cranky) discussion establishes the following points:* She is to be addressed as The Leewit. Not “Miss Leewit",TheLeewit.* The whistles are the least of it.  (Magic, ugh.)* Vatches are, among other things, clumping stupid pains in the butt.* There will be no getting rid of the Leewit until she figures out whythisvatch decided to send her back to Old Yarthe.
Series: So, I Guess my Muse wants Marvel, now... [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1007676
Comments: 116
Kudos: 31
Collections: Love Me Some Crossovers





	1. Prologue

“You can’t do that.”

“Says who? Where in the rules does it say my game pieces must be people?”

“No, I mean you can’t. There’s a reason you can’t directly perceive the LinTym singularities and can’t touch them. If you could, they’d affect you, too.”

“Oh, come! Now you’re speaking as if LinTym were a real place, instead of a construct! No wonder you’re such a clumsy player!”

“But it _is_ a real...”

“See, the way the board is set up, even though I can’t perceive them directly I can still determine that the singularities are there, there, there ---”

“Don’t!”

“-- there, there, and there, and I can...”

_“Don’t!!”_

“What- What is happening to me? I’m...”

“I tried to warn you...”


	2. The Leewit Arrives

Peter, Rhodey, and Vision were the first to encounter her, and none of the three were ever entirely certain, then or at any time afterward, that the Leewit was not another natural disaster. One moment, Rhodey had been wheeling himself into position next to the couch Peter sprawled on, with Vision hovering behind, and the next, Peter said, “uh-oh,” and shoved Rhodey’s chair backward out of the way. The other two heard the sound the next moments after that, while Rhodey wheeled himself behind the kitchen island looking for cover, Vision brought his hands up in readiness, and Peter scrambled for his backpack and skittered up to the ceiling, gearing up as rapidly as he could. For a few moments, the sound only grew louder: a penetrating hum that managed to be deep and high-pitched, both at once, making ears buzz and the bulletproof windows vibrate. Then the sound ceased abruptly in a crump of displaced air, and the Leewit appeared.

Peter and Rhodey both had to blink a few times before they recognized the thrashing shape on the floor as human…oid. A girl, it looked like, in perhaps her early-to-mid teens, with bony limbs that flailed spikily about her as she jerked and shuddered. It looked something like an epileptic fit, or a post-taser seizure. She seemingly had no awareness of her surroundings. She had pale hair, and her clothes, what could be seen of them within her contained frenzy, were formfitting and gray, with a darker jacket atop them. Some sort of uniform, perhaps? 

“I am alerting Mr. Stark,” Vision announced, “and requesting that Medical have people on standby.” 

Even as he spoke, the girl seemed to come to herself a little. She stopped crashing and shrieking, lay panting in the awkward arrangement of limbs her most recent convulsion had left her with for a moment or two, and slowly righted herself into a crouch. 

“Hey, kid,” Rhodey essayed.

The girl’s head snapped up to look at him. She took one sharp, flickering glance around the room, and then sprang into the air, landing on the back of the sofa. Her legs flexed. Peter called, “Oh, no you don’t!” and her next leap, in the direction of the shelving unit against the wall, was intercepted by a spray of web fluid. It caught the girl between the shoulders, jerking her backward a little. More webs wrapped around her and then suspended her upside-down from the ceiling, bouncing gently. The girl stopped struggling and glared at them all. Then her eyes narrowed. She puckered her lips as if she were about to blow them all a kiss and _whistled._

It was not a pitch or timbre that a human mouth should have been able to produce. All of them, even Vision, winced, and the lights flickered. Both Peter’s web shooters cracked open, the fluid expanding out of them like canned biscuit dough. So now he and the girl were stuck to opposite corners of the common room ceiling. Peter squawked indignantly. The girl smirked.

“What the hell was that?” Peter demanded.

The girl narrowed her eyes at him again, worked her mouth a couple of times, and finally spoke recognizable words. Well, some of them were recognizable. “Stupid clumping vatch,” she grumbled, “stupid clumping Egger route, dropping me Patham knows where. Couldn’t even bring Ta’zaara with me, and how’s the Captain supposed to handle that Chaladoor run without me on the Nova guns?”

“Cap’s giving guns to kids now?” Tony stepped from the elevator, wearing his gauntlets and a thunderous expression. The girl cocked her head at him, looking unconcerned, if a bit red in the face from being upside down.

“There’s more than one Captain in the world, Tony,” Rhodey said mildly.

“Pretty sure Captain Pausert’s never been here,” the girl agreed with surprising equanimity for someone who had been swearing a moment before. And was still upside-down. “At least, not anytime recently.”

“Captain Pausert, not Rogers,” Tony said, flatly, watching her face for any signs of recognition, and finding none.

“Never heard of Rogers,” the girl said earnestly.

“Sure you haven’t,” Rhodes muttered.

“So who are you with?” Tony persisted, “The X-men? Brotherhood of Mutants? Runaways? AIM?”

“Never heard of any of them, either,” the girl said. She wriggled a little, setting herself swinging, and wriggled more rhythmically until she swung back and forth like a pendulum. The webbing held. “I don’t even know where I am. One minute I was playing cards with Vezzarn and Goth and Ta’zara, next minute that vatch had me and whoops! Rattling down the Egger route. Big sucker, that vatch. Fast, too: Captain’s a vatch handler, and they mostly don’t get past him that easy.”

“What’s a ‘vatch?’” Peter asked.

“Where am I?” the girl countered.

“You,” Tony said, “Are in the middle of a highly secure complex in Upstate New York. I’m guessing you’re going to claim you’ve never heard of the Avengers, either?”

The girl furrowed her brow. “Sure, lots of them. There’s two or three gangs working out of Uldune call themselves that, and a troupe of acrobats that signed on with Himbo Petey once, and some famous folk heroes in Nikkeldepain. Never heard of New York, though.”

The two men and Peter and Vision all looked at each other. Vision began calculating the odds for various explanations of the scenario: lying, delusional, actually Not From Here… Tony took pity on Peter and sprayed solvent on the knots of webbing that had formed around the burst canisters. Peter flipped himself back down to the floor and dug hurriedly through his backpack. Or tried to. His backup web canisters had been inside, it seemed, because he had to spray more solvent at the flap to get it to open at all. Growling, he reached in and pulled out a blob that consisted of one cracked webshooter, a world history textbook, several dozen sheets of loose-leaf paper, and a motherboard. He let out an inarticulate yelp. Tony and Rhodey looked sympathetic.

After another moment, Tony sprayed more solvent on the piece of webbing that kept the girl suspended from the ceiling, though not on the bits that kept her arms pinned to their sides. He meant to help her down, too, but she tucked her body into a rapid flip and roll that propelled her halfway across the room and up onto her feet. Rhodey whistled, impressed. Tony gestured invitingly at a footstool and the girl sat down.

“How about America? The United States. Sound familiar at all?” The girl continued to shake her head. 

“Our planet is called Terra, or Midgard, or Earth,” Peter offered, growing visibly more excited at the prospect of another alien. At the last word, their invader jerked bolt upright and stared at them with pale gray eyes gone wide.

“Earth?” Tony repeated, “where the native intelligent (loosely speaking) species is humans?”

The girl paled. It was hard to tell if this was shock, or simply her natural coloration when she wasn’t throwing a fit after manifesting out of thin air and then hanging upside-down for a while. “Patham’s seventh hell,” she whispered, “That vatch sent me to _Old Yarthe?”_

Lengthy (and increasingly cranky) discussion established the following points of understanding and (reluctant) agreement between the compound’s residents and their visitor:

\- The girl was to be addressed as The Leewit, or, if one were being very formal, Your Wisdom, the Leewit. (“Not “Miss Leewit, _the_ Leewit,” she insisted, “like _the_ Empress.” “How does one earn the title of Leewit?” “In my case, time traveling to ancient Nartheby, destroying the execution chamber of Castle Aloorn, and inspiring the legends that my parents named me after.” “Riiiight. Moving on.”)

\- She came from the far future, or _a_ far future, when humans occupied multiple star systems. (Whether it was the future of this earth was an open question. The Leewit claimed never to have heard of Asgard. Or the Kree. Or the Chitauri. And Tony liked to think he was at the forefront of the ET frontier, but he’d never heard of Nartheby, whose denizens supposedly taught – would teach? – humans to build FTL travel devices.)

\- She was able to speak and understand 21st- century English due to something called “Klatha.” Klatha was also responsible for the uncanny, destructive whistles. (Peter asked if she could destroy things other than web cannisters and she burst every coffee mug in the sink before Tony got a hand over her mouth.) She declined to discuss what Klatha was or what else she could do with it, but the colloquial term for a human Klatha user was “Witch.” (Tony winced. Magic, ugh.) 

\- The Leewit would not whistle any other delicate equipment to destruction if Tony and Rhodey did not attempt to remove her from the Avengers facility to somewhere like, oh, Charles Xavier’s school. Because “the vatch” had chosen this place and time for a reason. Also, her arguments made it clear, her native country (Planet? Culture?) didn’t hold formal education in high esteem.

\- The Leewit would try to explain “vatches” a little later, but not right now. The men got the impression that the entities were possessed of terrible power and inhuman understandings, not easily summarized. And they were, apparently, stupid pains in the butt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, y'all, welcome back to the inside of my head. Happy to hear from any of you about whatever. Updates approximately once a week. 
> 
> Also, let me know specifically if you think this thing needs CW tags? The official position of this fic is that CW is A Thing That Happened, about which Tony is still salty, so there's some sniping here and there. But I don't think it's a CW fic.


	3. The Leewit Meets Friday.

The Leewit prowled about the “guest suite,” trying to acclimate herself to Old Yarthe. On one hand, the place was not quite as horribly primitive as she’d been half-expecting. Up until now, her only real contact with Yarthian culture had been aboard the showboat _Petey B,_ in those plays Dame Ethulassia and Sir Richard produced. They’d been full of sword fights and crazy old men in the rain, and there were messengers running back and forth all the time because no one seemed to have a communicator, or even fusion generators. This place was certainly more comfortable than that, and indeed the Leewit’s bed was absolutely boggling in its luxury: the mattress was easily half a meter thick and the whole thing was probably a meter and a half wide, or even a little more. The soft, boxy armchairs that framed a table and a broad window were nearly the size of her bunk aboard the Venture. She had certainly curled up and slept in worse places, on her various adventures. A primitive wall-storage unit, basically a wooden chest with smaller wooden boxes that slid in and out of it, had enough empty space to contain every single thing the Leewit owned, with plenty of room left over for everything her sister Goth owned, too, unless she’d stolen something really bulky recently. (Not Maleen, though. Maleen was a bit of a fashion plate and had accumulated a ridiculously large wardrobe once she’d settled down planetside and had the room.)

On the other hand, some of the technology was just weird. Dinner, for instance. For the Leewit, dinner came in one of two modes. Either a person ate on shipboard, in which case the robo-butler took care of everything, or one ate a human-cooked meal, which meant everything fresh-picked, or recently butchered, and put together step-by step. Goth had been getting into fancy cooking recently, using her talent for porting items to handle multiple processes at once. These people, however, had a giant cold box full of smaller boxes, made of paper or thin metal. They prepared dinner by opening one of these little boxes and putting it into yet another box, whose purpose was to warm the cold things up. Given the power draw it took to keep the cold box cold, the whole thing seemed like a huge and inexplicable waste of energy to the Leewit. 

The food was pretty good, though, if messy: it involved broad noodles, layered with vegetable paste and some kind of soft curd, all of it quite salty, but satisfying. The boy Peter ate half a tray of it, the two older human men ate more reasonable quantities, and the android, of course, ate nothing.

The Leewit frowned and bounced on her heels. She wasn’t getting anywhere on her first ever solo mission ever (and yes, vatch tricks absolutely counted. Just because it wasn’t a Karres assignment didn’t mean it wasn’t a solo mission) wandering around an ancient guest room. Somewhere in the “secure facility,” she was sure, the hyper man called, variously Tony, Tones, Mr. Stark, and Boss, and his followers (only one or two names apiece) were making plans for her immediate future. She was really not interested in lurking in a room, however luxurious, when she could be finding things out. She surveyed the space thoughtfully, then clambered up on top of the chest. There was an air intake grating in the ceiling just there…

A chiming sound came from all four corners of the room at once, followed by a bland, feminine voice. “Sorry, Your Wisdom, but the boss would much rather you stayed out o’ the vents just now.”

The Leewit whipped her head around. “What are you?” she demanded.

“I am Friday, an artificial intelligence incorporated into the structure of this building.”

“So… a robo-butler, then?”

“I’ve not heard of those, but maybe something like.”

The Leewit eyed the intake grating. “What happens if I go into the vents anyway?” she asked.

“I am authorized to activate certain security measures to protect the building and its inhabitants. And I’d squeal to the boss.”

The Leewit settled herself back down on the chest, swinging her legs and thinking. She was pretty sure she could, if she had to, whistle most if not all the defenses in the vents to pieces. Sensors, perhaps some subsonics, lasers, gasses… Gasses were tricky, but if she got the trigger mechanism… but there really wasn’t any point. If the “Avengers” had captured her, or if one of the crew of the _Venture_ were in trouble somehow, the Leewit wouldn’t hesitate at all. But as it was, sneaking around the building, however entertaining, would be rude. She sighed elaborately. Not being the baby of the family was hard, sometimes. “Is there anything you can tell me about Mr. Stark or the others?” she asked, without much hope. Robo-butlers weren’t nearly as gossipy as the real kind.

But Friday had an actual useful suggestion. “If you would settle yourself within view of the monitor, Your Wisdom, I would be happy to provide you with the introductory material given to potential Avengers recruits, as well as links to their Wikipedia pages and some other useful reference sites.”

The Leewit hopped down obligingly to the floor, and then wiggled her toes, which felt gritty. She growled to herself. When she’d first started going Roundabout with her sisters, at the age of five or six, she swore that the moment she had a solo mission and nobody around to tell her what to do, she would stop taking baths. She hated baths: folding herself up into the tub, and the water growing scummier and soapier, and the cold air on the parts of her skin that weren’t in the water… But she was getting to the point where she disliked being dirty even more. Her clothes had gotten all sweaty as she fought her way through the aftermath of the Egger route, and then all that jumping around while she met the four men in the complex, to say nothing of the kind of dirt one just picked up going about one’s day.

“I’ll let you know,” she told the robo-butler, and padded into the wet room of her guest suite, ready to explore another aspect of old Yarthe.


	4. The Leewit vs. Tony’s Guest Bathroom.

The wet room was done in a sleek, gray-and white style, with all the weird mix of luxury and really clumping stupid design choices she had already come to expect from Old Yarthe. The tiles under her feet were warm enough that there must be some kind of temperature mechanism in the floor, and one of the buttons on the control panel lit up a line of red in the wall that radiated a pleasant heat. One niche in the wall held folded towels, also warm, and a set of knobs protruding from the wall were meant, perhaps, as drying pegs. But for all those little touches, the design of the washbasin was wholly impractical: too small to sit in, on top of a pedestal that wouldn’t hold anyone’s weight anyway, and the faucet set too low to stick one’s head underneath, which would make hair-washing an absolute nightmare. There was another basin, lower down, but she’d already had that conversation with Friday earlier, and she wasn’t about to wash in the organic waste disposal outport. That was just icky.

Well, maybe she’d explore just a little bit more, then, before she washed off in the horrible basin. 

The niche next to the mirror, above the basin, held a number of intriguing little bottles and things. There was a comb, wrapped for some reason in a crackly, transparent envelope, and a cup, similarly wrapped. A white wand a little longer than the Leewit’s hand sat on its own little bump in the niche. It had controls on it – a circle on one side and a line on the other. When the Leewit picked it up and pushed the circle, it buzzed in her hand. When she pressed the line, it stopped. Great Patham, surely these Yarthians didn’t give vibrators to just any old guests, did they? 

Friday’s voice cut in, smoothly. “You will find heads for the toothbrush in the small box on the next shelf up, Your Wisdom, along with toothpaste.”

The Leewit startled. “Are there camera pickups in the _wet room?”_ she demanded.

“Audio only, Your Wisdom, unless my emergency protocols are engaged. I just guessed about the toothbrush from the sound of it.”

Oh. So it was the motor for a toothbrush, not a vibrator. That made more sense, she supposed. The Leewit found the little box Friday had mentioned. It held tiny, round brush heads, all encased in the same crackly stuff as the cup and the comb, and a little sealed tube that, according to the enthusiastic writing printed on the side, would do everything for the health and beauty of one’s teeth that it was possible to do. The Leewit fumbled the cap off (spiral threaded, it was) and sniffed. It smelled like muscle rub.

Well, she would clean her teeth later. First, she explored the other contents of the niche. The bottles, each of which held a quarter-liter or so, had confusing tops like the heads of long-necked birds, but they unscrewed just like the toothpaste cap to reveal scented goop of various sorts – soap, one of them seemed to be, and some kind of lotion, or perhaps it was hair oil. The crane-necked lids had long tubes sticking out of the bottom of them into the goop – the Leewit thought at first they were meant as daubers, but why hollow daubers? She peered uncertainly at the one that seemed to hold soap and spotted a minute crust of goo, dried slightly darker than what was in the bottle, at the end of the bill of the stopper… which was also hollow… Pumps, she realized. Tiny hand pumps, so you just get a little blob of goo out at a time. That was really pretty clever. Fussy, but clever. Very Yarthian. The Leewit would be sure and pass the idea on, though, the next time she was home. Karres did a very good trade in luxury organics and this kind of cleverness was just the sort of thing that might catch on, as a novelty. She ran her goo-daubed fingers through her hair. She might use the soap instead of the toothpaste when the time came – Pausert had washed her mouth out with soap for collecting alien swearwords so often that she’d come to like the taste. But now she had goo in her hair and she was going to have to stop stalling and use the dratted basin pretty soon.

Not just yet, though, because the wet room was huge – easily the size of the cabin she and Goth shared aboard the _Venture_ – and a good half of it was cut off from the rest by a glass wall, for no good reason at all that the Leewit could see. She prowled along it, testing, and finally found a metal plate at doorknob height, curved in a way that made a useful grip. She tugged at it, experimentally, and heard the click of a magnetic catch giving way as a section of glass swung outward. A door. Alright. The space on the other side of the wall was done in darker tiles, with occasional decorative holes, outlined in more metal, and there was a drain on the floor. Why a drain here and not by the washbasin? The wall niches here spouted two kinds of scented goo – one soapy, one oily – as soon as the Leewit placed her hand in them. Next to the goo niches was a… control panel? It had shiny knobs with finger dents, each embossed with a stripe that started out narrow and blue on the right side of the dial and grew wider and redder as it curved to the left. The knobs were labeled things like “rain soaker,” “Flex head,” “Shoulder jets,” “Lumbar jets”, and one at the end that was matte rather than shiny and had a lot of tick marks around it with numbers, was labeled “steam.” The Leewit sighed. Klatha language skills were sometimes less than useful. She reached out and twiddled one of the knobs.

“Beg pardon, Your Wisdom.” FRIDAY’s voice came over the com before the Leewit had finished swearing at the spray of water that had hit her in the face from one of the decorative holes in the wall. “Would you like a brief tutorial on the shower functions?”

The Leewit successfully scrabbled the knob back into its original position and stood panting for a moment. “What’s a shower?”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

An hour later, clean, damp, and nearly boneless with the aftereffects of a hot-water massage, the Leewit wrapped herself in a fluffy robe she found folded in the same niche as the giant towels and padded back into the main room, where FRIDAY had pulled up a nice selection of information on the viewscreen about the history and current membership of the Avengers. The Leewit minimized it all in favor of learning about pumping systems and tankless water heaters before she even started looking into Tony Stark and company. She was going to install showers on the _Venture_ when she got back. And then she was going to scale them up and sell them to all the robber barons of Uldune. And the Empress Hallie. And the Nartheby Sprites, and everybody else… She was going to be so rich…. But that would do for now. Putting her newfound obsession aside, the Leewit finally pulled up the information FRIDAY had provided and read until the relentless 2-D gave her a headache, then curled up in her enormous borrowed bed. For a vatch game, her time on Old Yarthe was proving surprisingly comfortable thus far.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had way, way too much fun deciding how to reconcile a mid-century view of the far future where paper maps are a reasonable thing for an interstellar ship to use with something that might plausibly evolve from the MCU. Short version, shower technology got lost during a phase when humans mostly lived on shipboard and had to preserve water to the nth degree.


	5. Peter and the Leewit

“Well, um, so…. you spend most of your time in Space?” Peter asked her, a little stiltedly. The boy’s many talents did not include small talk, it seemed. This actually endeared him to the Leewit a little, since she hated small talk. Nothing more frustrating than using klatha to listen in on a conversation and then finding out they weren’t talking about anything important. Leave that kind of thing to Goth and the Do Eldel, that was what the Leewit had to say.

Tony had more or less shoved her and Peter together over breakfast and ordered them to “hang out, do teenager things for a while. Except making out. Don’t start making out with Space Princess, Peter, your aunt would not be happy with me. Rhodey and I are going to his PT session.”

Peter had turned red and made a strangled sort of noise, after which he called at the closed door, “I have a girlfriend, you know!” which drowned out the Leewit’s own mutter of, “not a princess.”

However, maybe the older man’s insult had been calculated, because Peter’s apology for it and subsequent panegyric on the subject of someone named Emjay worked nicely to bridge any awkwardness between the two of them. Which left plenty of awkwardness that was just Peter’s, but still. They spent a good hour or two looking at pictures of Emjay and then investigating the other properties of the little handheld device called a “foan” that Peter stored them on. The Leewit thought at first that the autofiler system’s effect on long-term memory was probably accidental. And she was used to making allowances for people without Klatha and the huge number of things they needed to learn rather than just pick up by instinct. When Peter showed her a couple of the games you could play on the thing, though, she understood that the evil little machine was actually designed to make people stupider.

Peter looked a bit nonplussed when the Leewit announced her findings, but politely agreed to find something else to do. He guided her out into the grounds of what he called “Avengers Compound,” and they explored. They got into a brief tree-climbing contest in an area Peter called the “arboretum.” He explained that the trees were all scientific experiments, in addition to being trees: something about optimum carbon fixing. They were fun climbing trees, though – lots of branches sticking out like ladders. Peter proved to have a significant advantage at tree climbing, what with the sticky feet and the upper-body strength, but the Leewit got a couple of impressed noises out of him, and one of the moves she’d picked up from her circus days made him lose his concentration and catch a branch with his gut instead of his legs, which the Leewit counted as a win. She hadn’t even had to whistle him dizzy!

After that, Peter needed to recover his dignity a little with some truly spectacular swings and flips. The Leewit watched appreciatively. Peter looked much more sure of himself in the air, moving with far greater ease than he spoke. The Leewit caught herself gasping once or twice, watching from her own perch on another branch. _Is it him?_ she wondered. 

That wasn’t something she let herself think about very often, because if she thought about it too often she got cranky and the older members of her family (which was all of them) got all serene and told her things would work out, which made her want to bite things. But still… she would be of marriageable age in two years (Karres time.) Normally she would have had someone picked out by now. Maleen had chosen (if that was the word when you were talking about a premoter) her beau at eleven, Goth at twelve (much to Pausert’s bewilderment.) The Leewit was still unmatched, and while she would never, never admit to any anxiety about such a thing, she might be a touch… impatient. The premoters said she was going to bring someone in from the outside, the way Goth and their mother had. Something about how attracting “wild” klatha users and handling their unpredictable powers seemed to run in the bloodline. So the Leewit was on the lookout for wild klatha, maybe just a little more than the average witch. 

She’d thought Ta’zara might be it, when they first rescued him from the cannibals. He certainly had attached himself to her very strongly, had made a religion almost of keeping her safe. (Actually, no almost about it. Service was literally the backbone of the Na’kalauf religion.) Ta’zara wasn’t a bad old dope by any stretch, but he’d been aboard the Venture for ages without so much as relling a vatch. He had no klatha potential at all. And he was just a little… suffocating. 

Peter, now… the Leewit hadn’t actually noticed any signs of klatha use around him – whatever it was he did to climb walls seemed to be something else – but that didn’t mean anything. Pausert had taken a while, too. And Pausert, like Peter, had had a girlfriend already when he first ran into Goth. Illyla hadn’t been nearly as interesting as Emjay seemed to be, but even so… the Leewit wondered.

The branch the Leewit sat on vibrated a little as Peter landed on the end of it, then balanced his way up until he could sit closer (but not too close) to her. “Um, so… any idea what you’re going to do when the weekend’s over and we all leave the complex? Because I was thinking if you don’t have other plans maybe you could come to school with me – meet Ned and Emjay and maybe even go patrolling with me afterward and do hero…y…type things?”

“What’s a weekend?”

So Peter explained the Yarthian system of work days and rest days, and then, for good measure, tried to explain High School. The Leewit was horrified.

“Oh, brother! So it’s not just the foans that are set up to make people stupider, it’s everything!”

Peter bridled a bit, then shrugged. “Um, yeah, school’s pretty soul-sucking, really,” he admitted. “But, y’know, it’s not all bad? Oh. But, um, if you decide to go with me, just… my powers are a secret there, OK?”

“What powers?”

Peter gawped at her. “My Spidey powers! The sticking to walls and the super-strength and the healing and so on. I’m not… people can’t know about them. They’ll, like, try to kidnap me for experiments or… or stuff like that. And they’ll try to hurt M- my friends and family. When I’m at school, I have to just be ordinary.”

“Oh.” The Leewit stretched herself backward until she was hanging from the branch by her knees, then pulled herself upright again. “That one. Yeah, Witches have gotta be careful, too, except a few places like Uldune. There’s some bad people out there. And some bad… other things, too. You can’t go Roundabout until you know about how to keep your mouth shut.” 

The Leewit had been careful not to let her… captors? Hosts? know what else she could do besides languages and whistles. She kept dithering a bit about it, honestly. Because she wondered if klatha healing would help Cl. Rhodes at all, if she tried it. But healing was one of those things – like the Sheewash Drive – that could turn someone from a girl into a commodity very, very quickly indeed, and the Leewit didn’t entirely trust any of the Yarthians.


	6. Tony Talks to Someone who is Not a Dope

“Pepper, what the hell am I going to do?”

Honestly, sometimes Tony liked videocalls with Pep even more than he liked her being there in person. Having her there in person was optimal, of course, for being able to touch her and all related activities, but when she was on the main lab screen in HD, her head showing up on the monitor at three times life-size, then he could concentrate on every detail of her features: the different blur patterns of her eyeliner that hinted at whether she’d been smiling or frowning for most of the day, the perfect line of her nose, the little flecks of green and darker blue in her blue eyes, the satin finish of her pink nails as she pinched the bridge of her nose and prayed for patience.

“I mean,” Tony said, though Pepper doubtless already knew what he meant and was just waiting for him to catch up, “She has refused on pain of my bots’ deaths to go to Xavier’s, which is about the only place I can think of besides the Compound where she’d be safe. There are a few fuckwads on the Council who probably think she needs to be dissected, and we can’t let them be the ones to make the call. And, I mean, I totally want to pick her pointy adolescent brain about whatever she can tell me about future science, so it would be kind of handy to have her around, but, I have… stuff… to do, as you will doubtless remind me in a minute. I mean, she’s a teenager, so it’s not like she’s going to just put things in her mouth if I turn my back, is it? If it- ”

“If you want to put her up in one of the guest bedrooms at the New York site, Tony,” Pepper interrupted, “I will not stop you. Adding her to your strays roster with Peter and Harley does not exactly support your claim to not be Batman, but that’s your problem, not mine.”

“Hey!”

“Maybe you need to break it down a little? The Leewit is a teenage girl who is here on Yar- _Earth_ – for an indefinite, but, according to her, limited time. That’s one set of problems. The Leewit is a dimensional traveler who teleported into your rec room at the Compound. That’s two more sets of problems: the science set and the defensive set.”

As Pepper untangled Tony’s thoughts for him, he threw holo-displays up for each of the sub-problems she outlined and tried not to completely swoon over his ladylove again. _See?_ he chanted triumphantly to the critics in his head, _See? Pepper GETS it! See?_

“Also, the Leewit is an enhanced individual and a potential asset, who is also, by all appearances, underage and a stateless person to boot. That’s a political problem.”

“Of fucking course it is. OK. Thanks, Pep. I should buy you a thing. Maybe… Virginia? You’re a lot more awesome than your namesake state, you know.”

“No, Tony, you cannot buy Virginia, or even Guam. And nobody ever, ever called me Virginia except my aunt Shiloh and my first supervisor at SI.” 

“What did everyone else call you?” Tony should know this. He should. Her parents called her “Ginny,” but there was a Jenny and a Genevive and Jeanie at her schools, so…

“Queenie.”

“Damn straight.” Tony grinned at the giant, beautiful Pepper image in front of him and they got down to business. Science and politics first, because they were the fun ones.


	7. A Little More About Vatches

They were in a laboratory; it reminded the Leewit of _Venture’s _control room, at least in the atmosphere, if not the details. The robots were horribly primitive – if not quite as bad as the cold box – but the viewscreens were pretty good and some of them were even properly 3D. Instead of star maps and ship readouts, most of the screens around this room showed a variety of faces, nearly all men, all of them over thirty, nearly all of them with rather thin, acetic-looking faces wearing expressions much like Mr. Stark’s. There was a blonde woman called Soo who leaned into the pickup of one of the frames now and then, which was mostly occupied by a man called Reed. And the Leewit, a little slip of a thing only fourteen years old (Karres time) had them all in the palm of her hand. She wriggled her shoulders in deep and smug contentment.__

“Sooo… vatches.” Mr. Stark’s casual tone of voice contrasted hugely with the avid hunger on his face. Engineers with new toys, it seemed, were much the same on Old Yarthe as anywhere else. The Leewit hoped vatches would be entertaining enough for him that he didn’t start deciding she should be his new toy. 

Colonel Rhodes looked deeply skeptical. 

“Vatches,” said the Leewit, “are extra-dimensional beings who like to make trouble. They seem to be especially attracted to Klatha use, so witches have to deal with them quite a bit.” 

"What kind of trouble?” asked a face in a viewscreen. This one had gray hair. Pimm, his name was. 

“And how does one deal with it?” This one called himself “Strange,” and “Sorcerer Supreme,” which was pretty arrogant, but then, this place was thousands of years before Karres, and the Leewit guessed a naturally hot witch with no one around to take them down to size might tend to get a little full of himself. 

__She would start with what every Karres witch knew. ( _She_ knew quite a bit more than that, of course, thanks to the Captain and his weird-even-for-witches talents, but that wasn’t information she was going to just freely pass out to anyone.)_ _

__Vatches didn’t seem to understand that people were _real;_ she explained. When they spoke (echoing in your head, all at once, like smelling the color of a ringing bell) they tended to address their victims as “Dream Thing.” They liked to find a person or a group of people, pick them up, and stick them in really clumping dangerous situations to see if they could puzzle the way out, as a kind of game. For the really big and powerful vatches, the “games” tended to have galaxy-wide implications in their outcomes, and the witches didn’t have time to argue about whether that was on-purpose or not, but if they were drunk they might anyway. The one sure thing about vatch tricks: there was almost always a way out if you looked. But if you didn’t figure it out, then you died._ _

__“So, vatches basically treat our world like it’s … what, a movie? And they’re fanfic writers?” That was Peter, perched halfway up a wall in the lab._ _

__“I was going to go with RPGs and sadistic DMs,” said Tony, “but that one works too. Especially if the way out of the vatch puzzle tends to involve having sex.”_ _

__“Ew,” said the Leewit, “And I don’t know that any of those things you just said mean.”_ _

__“Did you used to be into D &D, Mr. Stark?” Peter looked delighted._ _

__Cl. Rhodes snorted. “He lasted through two sessions with a group at MIT before the DM got tired of a ten-minute argument every time he rolled the dice and kicked him out.”_ _

__“It was dumb anyway,” Mr. Stark shrugged. “Anything else you feel like telling us about vatches, Tinkerbell? Anything make them stronger, or weaker, or more likely to be cooperative?”_ _

__“How intelligent are they?” Soo’s voice came from a viewscreen._ _

__“How can you tell if they’re there?” asked Pimm._ _

__“Is the vatch that brought you here likely to make trouble for the rest of us?” That was another man’s voice coming from Pimm’s viewscreen, which abruptly showed the back of Pimm’s head. Pimm’s voice and the other man’s were muffled and argumentative, and then a figure about ten centimeters tall scrambled up the shoulder of a disgruntled Pimm and waved. “Hi, I’m Scott. I’m not always fun-sized, but I’m always more fun than Hank is.”_ _

__“I really don’t know,” the Leewit told them all, frankly, ignoring the manikin’s other fascinating aspects in favor of answering the question. “It might depend on how much klatha everyone else is using. The thing is, though, I’m not a vatch handler. I can only talk to them if they decide they want to talk to me, and I haven’t so much as relled the one that brought me here since the first day, so I don’t know what it’s thinking. When it grabbed me, it just said, ‘OH, PERFECT! YOU’LL DO VERY NICELY,’ and next thing I knew, Egger route.” The Leewit took a sip of water, to clear her throat of the aftereffects of trying to imitate a vatch voice._ _

__“Is that usual for vatches?” Soo asked, at the same time Peter said, “Rell?”_ _

__“They usually gloat a little more than that,” the Leewit shrugged. “And, you can’t hear, see, feel, or smell vatches. You rell them. Except you need klatha to do that, so most people can’t.”_ _

__“Well, that’s not useful at all,” Tony complained, “Can you make anything out of that, Strange?”_ _

__“Not a positive identification,” the Sorcerer Supreme said. “It sounds as if these ‘vatches’ are identified by their behavior and their… energy output, with human perceptions of both being quite limited. The chances for category errors would be … extensive.”_ _

__“Like vatches are the hrududu from _Watership Down_ ,” Peter suggested. Tiny Scott clapped his hands at this, and almost everyone else rolled their eyes. _ _

__“Something like that,” sighed the Sorcerer. “I have research to do.” And the screen he looked through blanked out._ _

__“Anyone else have anything to add?” Tony asked, sounding irritated. “Then let’s call it quits for the day. We all have articles to publish and life-changing inventions to invent, or, in Scott’s case, steal. We’ll add vatches to our long list of things that we wish we didn’t have to deal with and keep in touch.”_ _

__

__^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^_ _

__

__Steaming gently from the second shower of her life and wrapped in a fluffy towel, the Leewit folded herself into one of the two stuffed chairs in her gigantic bedroom and resisted the urge to bite her fingernails. If she thought the primitive Yarthians would have had any notion of what to do about it, she would have protested a lot harder at the meeting today, because the silence of the vatch that had sent her here was giving her the jimjams. This was simply not how vatches behaved. Vatches did not just drop a person into the deep past and sit around twiddling whatever they had instead of thumbs. Vatches put their game pieces into maximum danger. And if said game pieces got out of danger too easily, they upped the stakes._ _

__The Leewit’s initial encounter with the Avengers had been pretty typical of a vatchy challenge – straight out of the Egger Route into a fight with four men. Other times it had been palace guards. Or invisible pre-diaspora Sabertooth Bollums. But the Leewit had worked out a detente with the Yarthians in less than an hour, yet this vatch had not, so far, chosen to throw in any mad pirates or suddenly resurrected Sheem robots. Either the Leewit was missing something, or the Vatch should be getting bored about now._ _

__**YOU WORRY TOO MUCH.** _ _

__The Leewit’s whole body jerked at the deep relling. Of course the vatch would choose now to do put in another appearance. It could be dangerous even to _think_ about vatches, if you weren’t a hot enough witch to work the lock spell and keep them from listening in. The Leewit was… almost there, but not quite. Within the next year or two, maybe, Karres time. But she refused to let the vatch throw her off her dignity. “Easy for you to say,” she told it._ _

__**DID I TELL YOU I WANTED YOU FOR A GAME? OR TO PASS A TEST?** The words clanged through her like the sound of garlic or the taste of electric blue. **I DID NOT CHOOSE YOU TO RELIEVE MY BOREDOM; I HAVE A TASK FOR YOU.**_ _

__That was… if anything, more disturbing still. The Leewit knew of only a few other vatches that knew that the human reality was real, not some kind of daydream. None of the others were anywhere near so powerful as this one. And what could the Leewit do that such a vatch couldn’t? “What kind of task?” The Leewit croaked, once she’d managed to swallow the lump in her throat._ _

__**YOU WILL KNOW IT WHEN YOU SEE IT. JUST TELL YOUR NEW COMPANIONS YOU WILL HELP KEEP THIS PLANET SAFE FROM THE MAD ONE AND FOLLOW THEIR LEAD.** _ _

__The Leewit straightened up and tried to plant her fists on her hips, impeded somewhat by the armchair. “Really? _That’s_ what you’re giving me to work with? Even Little Bit can explain things better!”_ _

__**THE ONE THAT HAS MADE PETS OF THE VENTURE’S CREW IS YOUNG AND MEDDLESOME. HOWEVER, IT MAY BE AMUSING TO GIVE YOU A HINT…** _ _

__“You think so?”_ _

__**YOU, LITTLE CREATURE, ARE WHAT IS CALLED A HOT WITCH.** _ _

__“ ‘Course I am.” And she was _so_ going to brag to her sisters when she got back home about how a _giant-vatch_ had known she was a hot witch!_ _

__**IT WILL BE WORTH YOUR WHILE TO WORK WITH A COLD ONE.** _ _

__There was a great sucking sensation, as if the vatch, departing, took most of the air in the room with it, and then the Leewit was alone again, panting and rubbing her forehead. The purple spots were still dancing inside her nose when there was a faint humming sound and Vision floated up through the floor. It was, the Leewit thought, completely unfair how thoroughly Vision’s preferred transportation methods eclipsed the Egger Route in every possible way. But her irritation helped clear out the last of the sensory aftermath of the vatch’s presence._ _

__“Pardon me, Your Wisdom,” the android said politely, “but my sensory array detected a disturbing… presence? Influence? Energy? … a disequilibrium of some kind, in your rooms. I thought perhaps I could be of assistance. Was that a… vatch?”_ _

__“Yeah,” the Leewit sighed, “that was a vatch.”_ _


	8. The Leewit is an 084

After the vatch’s intervention, the Leewit figured that the next step would be to let everyone know that she was supposed to help them with “the mad one,” and then she’d start training with them, or possibly holing up in the labs with Tony and talking ship mechanics and astrogation, depending. Her initial announcement went more or less as expected. She passed the first part of the vatch’s message on at supper that night. (It was, not a quieter table, since Tony liked banter, but a smaller one. Peter had been shunted off toward his home in someplace called Kweenz as soon as the science conference broke up, and Vision, not needing to eat, didn’t always choose to be sociable. At the phrase, ‘the mad one’ both Tony and Rhodes looked at each other with equally blank expressions, long enough for the Leewit to take another bite of vegetables and rice stuck together with a spicy, tan-colored sauce, chew it, and wash it down with cold water flavored with orange juice. (And speaking of which, it seemed that orange juice was named, not for the color, but a Yarthian fruit called an orange! Although Yarthian blueberries tasted nothing like blue juice, so maybe it was just a coincidence.) 

Rhodes spoke first. “You don’t think they meant the Maximoff girl, do you? For “the mad one?” I mean, there’s a kind of symmetry to using one witch to bring down another but I really don’t see the powers lining up, strategically. Plus, you know, the Leewit’s a kid. Putting her up against that kind of crazy does not sit right with me.”

Tony shook his head and grunted. “How about Loki?” he countered. “I mean, supposedly he’s dead, last I heard, but I wouldn’t bet on it either way. Or...” Tony’s face grew pale and pinched, and he took a gulp of a drink he’d only been sipping before. “You’ve heard me on this one before, Rhodey. I saw what was waiting for us behind that portal. And Reindeer Games may have been the general of that army, but I would bet my – I would bet _Pepper’s_ life he was not the Commander in Chief. We know nothing about the Commander in Chief except that if he’s coming, it’s bad. If _that’s_ Tinkerbell’s ‘mad one,’ then yes, we need her. We need her for intel and tech and whatever else she is willing and able to provide.”

“And yet you spoke out against reaching out to Doom. And the kid is still a kid. With an unverifiable story, Tony.”

“First, Doom’s tech is inferior and his country’s population is too small to provide good cannon fodder. Secondly, I am not suggesting the kid be on the front lines.” Tony’s voice was clipped and a little angry, but arguing had brought color back into his face and life back into his dark eyes. Now, he grinned the way Peter had grinned when the Leewit turned a triple-somersault off one of the tree branches yesterday. “She’s a _time-traveler,_ Pookiebear! A time-traveler who pilots spaceships! You can bet I am picking her brain about every single last nut, bolt, unobtanium crystal and machine that goes ping.”

Rhodey folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “And when she says the unobtanium crystal comes from aisle six of Space Wallmart and hooks up to the red wire and that’s all she knows about it?”

“Still worth it. You and me and a whole lot of imaging equipment, kiddo. First thing tomorrow.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Tony’s prediction proved incorrect, though. Or, at least, incomplete. “First thing” proved to be at 0800 hours on the Yarthian 24-hour clock, or, two hours before Tony tended to get up if left to his own devices. And the conference room did indeed contain the Leewit, Tony, and a whole lot of imaging equipment. It also contained a pile of papers, a few hard plastic cases of… something, two middle-aged women in tight black uniforms who introduced themselves as Agent Hand and Agent Morse, and, via one of the 2-D monitors, a Stark Industries lawyer. They had come to discuss the Leewit.

Or rather, they had come to “investigate and contain the 084 you reported, Mr. Stark, under the aegis of the ATCU.”

The Leewit’s hair rose on the back of her neck. Neither the number nor the acronym meant a thing to her, of course, but the bland voices, the uniforms, the weapons at the women’s hips and the sleek cases they carried, all those were dishearteningly familiar, and the Leewit cursed herself for a fool for not having expected them. In her own time, of course, it was the ISS: specifically the faction that had been infiltrated by nanites. To say nothing of agents of the Agandar. Or of the Mother Plant. Or lesser, but enterprising, lawless types who nonetheless thought they had a chance to get their hands on a witch. 

The default prevention strategies were all about stealth. If you could, hide. Karres witches traveled under layers of deception – the best ID docs Uldune could forge, cover stories two or three deep, fake bulkheads on their spaceships, decoys for any important goods they wanted to smuggle. They hitched rides as merchandise on slave ships, as circus roustabouts, as refugee miffle farmers, anything too lowly to track. If they had the right talent, (which the Leewit didn’t,) and if the situation were dire enough to risk the vatchy attention that came from heavy klatha use, they employed light shifts, age-shifts and other tricks for fooling the eye. (The Leewit’s sister Goth could make their whole crew look like ISS brass and still have klatha left over to disguise the _Venture’s_ antique Nova guns as gravitic imploder lances. Goth was a hot witch.) 

Too bad that clumping… _beek-wok_ of a vatch had put paid to any kind of stealth mission at all. It had plunked the Leewit down, dazed from the Egger Route and with no support, in the middle of a “secure facility,” among the great and paranoid.

Luckily, the backup strategy was more viable: ally yourself with the biggest, baddest allies you could scare up. Neither Empress Hallie nor the Daal of Uldune would be born for thousands of years yet, but Tony Stark seemed to have a natural dislike for people in uniforms pulling rank on his property.

“This is going to be a pissing match, kid,” he advised the Leewit as he steered her down a hallway and out to a balcony. “I kind of need you to be there so it looks like I’m cooperating, but don’t say anything if you can avoid it and do _not_ allow those people to get their hands on you. And if they start pressing you about what you can do with this Klatha stuff, play dumb.”

The Leewit nodded crisply. “Got it.” 

Tony took a long pull from the thermos-flask he’d been clutching in one hand, then passed the flask to the Leewit. “Hold my coffee for a sec.” He stepped away from her and pressed buttons on the side of a wristband he wore habitually. Seconds later, the Leewit was rolling up from the balcony floor where she’d thrown herself tying to dodge incoming pieces of metal (coffee still unspilled, because the Leewit had _loved_ the circus, and she loved showing off even more), and Tony was encased in a pretty decent-looking exosuit. The only problem with it was the paint job: red and gold were horrible colors for working in vacuum: too gaudy for stealth work, but wavelengths entirely wrong for distance visibility if something went wrong.

The faceplate lifted. “Allow me to introduce you to Iron Man, your Wisdom. You can tell me how impressed you are later. OK, we’re all meeting at the gatehouse conference room, and I’m giving you a lift. Arms around my neck. Do not drop my coffee, I’m going to need it. Do not whistle.”

The Leewit obligingly climbed piggy-back onto the exosuit, wrapping her arms and legs around the hard-edged torso, and closed her eyes against the wind as they sprang into the air and zipped out to the edge of the compound to the so-called “gatehouse:” a brick building that sat at the top of a driveway and pretended to be the main building on the property.

The two women in black who met them in the conference room both rolled their eyes when Tony and the Leewit skimmed in. “The armor, Stark? Really?” the one called Agent Hand complained.

Tony plucked the thermoflask from the Leewit’s hand and nodded her into a chair – one on the opposite side of the table from the two agents and with at least two exits in easy reach, even if you didn’t count the vents. The Leewit tucked her legs up under her in her seat, the better to spring up or dive in unexpected directions if needed.

“We’re all busy people,” Tony said flippantly, “you would prefer to wait for us to take a golf cart? Now.” He waved a metallic hand at one of the screens, which sprang to life with a picture of a small, dark-haired woman in a light-purple blouse, “Allow me to introduce Jennifer Walters, here remotely from the offices of Stark Legal to help me sort out whatever bullshit you two are trying to pull and serve as a witness. And this kid is the Leewit, who is present because I received a direct order from my chain of command, and whom you are not getting your filthy mitts on.” He took another swig of coffee.

“084’s are the ATCU’s business, not yours, Stark.” That was the blonde agent, Morse. “And trust me, you do not want to make it your business. You want to spend your nonexistent free time reinventing our safety protocols? To make sure you can handle something that popped up in the middle of the most secure compound you could devise? And, not to be tactless, but historically, your past interactions with aliens and alien tech have not gone well.”

“If you want access to her,” Agent Hand stepped in, “or to any of the data SHIELD acquires related to her, I’m sure we can work something out. But you’re an engineer, not a politician or a biologist, and you are just not equipped to deal with a problem like the Leewit. SHIELD is. Dealing with this kind of curveball is, in fact, the primary mission of the ATCU.”

“Incorrect,” Tony replied. “Let’s all sit down for this, shall we?” He pulled a very sturdy-looking armchair out from the table and arranged himself in it, still in his exosuit. “Starting with your ‘primary mission.’ The ATCU is under orders to track down Kree and Kree descendants. The Leewit is neither. Friday, you wanna pull up the analysis from Saturday morning, please? Just the synopsis.” 

The screen with Ms. Walters’ face on it split in half, with the second half showing charts and numbers. Agent Hand shoved her glasses up the bridge of her nose and squinted. “DNA?” she asked.

“From hairs collected from the Leewit’s shower drain. Did you honestly think I was just taking her word for everything?”

The Leewit puzzled this over. Biometric data couldn’t tell you all that much unless you matched it against the databases, which she wouldn’t be in. 

“Human.” Tony was saying. “100% human. No Kree markers. No X-gene, either, for that matter. Therefore, not your business.”

“She’s Enhanced.” Agent Hand objected, fingers twitching as if she were trying not to reach for something – a weapon? One of the plastic cases?

“Maybe.” Tony’s exosuit was flexible enough at the joints to allow him to shrug, creakily. “Or maybe she _thinks_ she’s Enhanced and we’re dealing with another Killgrave type. She got teleported into the complex, not, she says, under her own power. She thinks she’s got an Enhanced ability to pick up languages, but maybe she just speaks a bunch of them and doesn’t remember how she learned. I had plans, which you have rudely interrupted, to test her on some stuff like Klingon and Ithkuil later. And to do a couple of brain scans and see if I can pick out anything that looks like implanted memories.”

“And destructive whistles?”

“Nothing you couldn’t do with your tech. And she hasn’t done anything since within an hour after her arrival, so whoever sent her could’ve been doing it remotely. If you’re really looking for a threat here, I recommend seeing if you can trace the energy signature of the so-called ‘vatch’ that teleported her. She talks about it the way Deadpool talks about ‘the author,’ but with fewer swearwords.”

“And if she really is a time traveler with powers?”

“Then she still isn’t Kree or mutant, and she still isn’t your business.”

Agent Hand’s voice got louder. “Under the Sokovia Accords –“

“Really?” Tony leaned back and crossed his arms in a gesture the Leewit was almost certain he’d learned from Rhodes. “That’s the angle you’re going to play? You are usually better at nuance than that, Vicky, but since it is way the hell too early in the morning, I will spell this out for you: The Accords are not law. Until they are ratified by Congress and signed by the President, they are a proposal. One with the support of the Secretary of State and many other UN representatives, but still not enforceable on their own. Now I, as a private citizen and an Avenger, signed the Accords and can be held accountable to them as with any other contract. And I can be held accountable under other international laws, as I sincerely hope my ex-colleagues will be soon. But the Accords do not give you, or any other agency, power over someone who didn’t sign them. She’s not ATCU business because she’s human. She’s not Accords business because she hasn’t signed and is not a citizen of any of the countries that enforce them universally. And you can’t _make_ her sign them because she’s a minor.”

“Is she?” Agent Morse made the Leewit nervous. Agent Hand was pretty deep into her argument with Tony, but every time the Leewit looked at Agent Morse, the other woman was looking back. And the Leewit would bet about a million maels (if she had them, and if anyone around here knew what a mael was) that the woman was not nearly as fidgety as she was pretending to be, that the hands wandering over the case in front of her, tapping her pen, shuffling papers, were in fact working comm gear, or preparing weapons, or… something. 

“Sure she is. How old are you, Tinkerbell?”

“Fourteen years, Karres time,” the Leewit answered promptly, and went back to staring at the screen, trying to puzzle out just what exactly the chemical composition of her hair was supposed to tell anyone.

“Which means what, exactly?” one of the women asked.

Tony brightened. “You know what, that’s actually a fun question. Let’s take a quick math break and figure out how Karres and Yar- Terran years compare to each other.”

It proved to be a pretty extensive math break. By comparing Yarthian and Karres measurements for the speed of light in a vacuum, they were able to conclude that the Yarthian second was about eight percent shorter than galactic standard second – something about having an aesthetically pleasing number of them fit into a Yarthian sidereal day. Tony expected to be able to extrapolate out from seconds to kiloseconds to days to years, and he got thrown badly when he learned that there was no such thing as a Karres standard year. When you were in the middle of a secret war with an intelligent plague and might have to move the planet to one of its backup orbits in a different star system at any time, there was simply no point in trying to track a few days here and there. At the end of the whole rigamarole, they decided that the Leewit was certainly no older than sixteen, and probably closer to fourteen, though her previous time-travel incidents muddied the waters.

“I don’t see why it matters,” the Leewit complained.

“Karres doesn’t have rules about how old you have to be to do certain things?”

She shrugged. “Can’t get married ‘til sixteen, but no, mostly we look at what has to get done and who can do it. Some of the bigger stuff you almost _have_ to be older for, because witches can handle more and more power over time, but there’s no rules about it.”

“Well,” said Tony, “here we have rules. And by those rules, you’re not old enough to make certain kinds of promises.” He glared across the table at the two agents. “Or take certain kinds of risks.”

“We’re not conscripting her, Tony,” Agent Hand said wearily.

“No, you’re ‘containing’ the ‘threat,’ which means you keep her locked up in a lab until she’s old enough to volunteer and broken enough to want to.”

The Leewit lost track of how many circles the argument went in after that because just about then the snek finally dropped about what the Yarthians meant by “DNA,” and she forgot to keep her mouth shut. At her aggrieved, “Oh, _brother!”_ the entire table went silent.

“What’s up, kid? Got a preference between foster kid or emancipated minor? Paperwork’s killer either way.”

The Leewit waved at the datascreen. The lawyer’s face had been squeezed into a handspan-sized box in one corner, to make room for competing documents, energy readouts, and Patham-knew-what. But the “DNA” was still up, if slightly hidden behind a spreadsheet titled _Training Simulation Development, SOW and Payment Schedule._ “The DNA thing,” the Leewit said, disgusted. “I just figured out my fate’s being argued by dopes who believe in clumping _geneomancy.”_

Three mouths at the table opened and shut for a few moments without anything coming out of them. Tony sipped at his coffee flask. “Is… genetic science not a thing in the future?”

“Science?” the Leewit scoffed, “It’s _fortune-telling._ Put your hair in the analyzer and they’ll tell you whether you’re going to die of cancer or hardening of the arteries and whether you should marry for love or money and what color your kids’ eyes will be.” She slumped back in her chair a little, making it tilt. Himbo Petey hadn’t allowed geneomancy booths in the sideshow. Rigged games were fine – throwing your money away on a few moments of fun was a perfectly acceptable coping mechanism. But selling a false picture of what would happen after the circus left town was, for Petey, beyond the pale.

Tony sighed. “OK, so two of those three things have actual data behind them, but whatever.”

“In a closed system like Yarthe, maybe,” the Leewit shot back. “Never mind. Go ahead and believe in your stupid antique superstitions. It’s not like it makes any difference to me.”

Tony raised his eyebrow. “You sure you want to fight me for her?” he asked the room, “She’s kind of a brat. We probably deserve each other.”

Agent Hand absentmindedly (hah!) clicked the latch open on the case by her elbow. The Leewit watched her other hand, which hovered near the weapon on her hip. She felt a sudden, gut-deep ache of longing for Goth. Goth wouldn’t have made the stupid mistake about speaking up in a roomful of people that was on the way to forgetting her. She would have picked up about sixteen useful things out of the arguments that had gone over the Leewit’s head. And Goth would have already ported every single device out of those closed cases and into the next room and replaced the weight with dirt from the garden. Goth would have skulked her way around the whole complex by now, hidden in no-shape, and had their escape route all planned out…

But the Leewit had never had to do any of that. Her job, on those kinds of operations, had been distraction: Throw a temper tantrum. Whistle something valuable into shards. Play the baby and let her big gray eyes well up until all the parental people in the room wanted to take care of her. She could sneak, when called on, but she couldn't hide in plain sight. 

To her chagrin and fury, the Leewit found herself crying. Real tears, even, which made it worse. She wasn’t just putting on a show; she couldn’t stop when she tried. No matter how tightly she clamped her mouth shut and tried to swallow, her breath moved through her in shudders and gasps, and her nose closed up until she had to sob to gather air at all, and the salt water rolled down her cheeks past her squinched-up eyelids, and there was a sort of hollow roaring in her chest, and there was nothing she could do about any of it.

Behind her, the Leewit was vaguely aware of the sound of Tony panicking. “Hey, hey, kid! You OK? This isn’t because I called you a brat, is it? I swear, it’s not a bad thing. I’m a brat. We’ll brat together. Just, c’mon, Leewit, I’m new at this kind of thing. Let me in easy – don’t do like, Girl Feelings on day one, huh? You want some water? Or a… hell, I dunno, a blanket or something?”

She shook her head violently, clutching her knees and trying to get herself back under control. “ ‘M fine,” she insisted, “I’m _fine,_ I – hh – just m-mi – really m-miss my – gl – my s-sister, all of a s-sudden.” She scrubbed fiercely at her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Oh, sweetie!” Agent Morse’s face had gone tender and melting, and her voice breathy. “Oh, of course you do, stuck in a strange place all alone and out of the blue. And we’ve been arguing about you, and I’m sure that’s scary too, but I promise, Leewit, nobody’s going to hurt you.” She stood up and started to reach across the table, ready to pat the girl comfortingly on the hand, or the shoulder. “We’ll get this sorted out and you’ll be safe, and we’ll figure out how to get you back home to your sister as soon as--”

Even through her tears, the Leewit caught the glint of metal in Agent Morse’s outstretched hand. She kicked herself backward out of reach, toppling the chair she was in, rolled to her feet (she’d been doing that an awful lot, lately, a cool, detached part of her brain noted,) and started to edge toward the door. “Don’t you touch me with that!” she hissed, and then, with the new surge of adrenaline burning the shakes out of her, she whistled.

This wasn’t a shatterer. It was barely a klatha whistle at all – just high and piercing and designed to cause pain to human eardrums. But that was enough to throw everyone else off their game. She noticed that Morse clamped only one hand over her ear and tried to block her other ear with her shoulder rather than touch herself with the hand she’d been going to touch the Leewit with. And in the next moment, Morse couldn’t have moved if she wanted to, because Tony had clamped his metal-bound hand around her wrist and set the other one on her shoulder. 

He’d lowered the faceplate again – or maybe it had come down automatically to shut out the noise – and his voice, while tinny and metallic, still managed to convey that there were raised eyebrows behind the mask. “Passing notes, Ms. Morse? Care to share with the class?”

Agent Hand, standing by the table with her gun drawn, glared at her partner. “What were you trying to pull, Bobbi? This op was not supposed to turn into a brawl!”

“Minimum acceptable results,” Morse spat. “You know what Stark’s like when he digs his heels in. There was no way we were going to be able to bring the 084 back with us today.”

“So instead,” Tony’s voice crackled, “You were going to stick her with…” he pried Agent Morse’s fist open and looked at the tiny device cradled in it, “a tracker implant, am I right?” 

Both agents had gone stone-faced, but Tony nodded, “Yeah, a tracker. So you could violate the Fourth Amendment as well as the Thirteenth? Do you guys have a bingo card or something?”

Agent Hand ignored him. “I was going,” she huffed, “to let _him_ talk us down to the tracker. If you hadn’t been so twitchy we could’ve had him agreeing and thinking he owed us a favor.”

“No you couldn’t,” said Tony, Agent Morse, and the SI lawyer, in tandem.

This skirmish apparently marked the end of the posturing between Tony and the two agents (was what what he’d meant by a “pissing match?") and the start of actual negotiations. The Leewit summoned up all her fourteen-year old maturity and tried to follow along and not wriggle, but it was hard when most of the conversation referenced rules and history she had no context for. She got the gist of it all right, though: both Tony and the Agents wanted to assess how much of a threat the Leewit was to their hapless antique Yarthian systems, and they wanted to know where to find her in case of trouble – either trouble she got into (Tony) or trouble she caused (the agents.) The primary source of disagreement seemed to be which of the two entities should be the one to keep an eye on her, and how much that one had to let the other one know.

“Can you teleport?” Agent Hand asked her, and the Leewit shook her head decisively and without thinking. Goth was their ‘porter. 

“Then how’d you end up here?” Agent Morse asked, for something like the fifth time. 

“The vatch sent me,” the Leewit answered, for something like the seventh time. “Lots of things I can’t do can still get done _to_ me.” It occurred to her belatedly that if the Yarthians were mistaking the Egger route for teleportation, then both that and the Sheewash drive might count for their purposes. The Leewit saw no reason to point this out to them; any circumstances in which she needed to make use of either method were going to take her out of their jurisdiction anyway.

“What _can_ you do?” Agent Hand asked.

; _Play dumb,_ Tony had advised. “I can understand any language there is,” the Leewit told them. “I can put my ankles behind my neck. I can whistle. I can turn a triple somersault, forward or backward. I can repair a Mk. XX Porluma HyperTree fusion-powered air recycler. I can read a space map...”

"What can you do with Klatha?" Agent Morse interrupted. 

The Leewit made her eyes very wide and did her best to imitate the Pathamite missionaries they’d found on the cannibal planet that one time. “Everything uses Klatha!” she declared, clasping her hands over her breastbone. “It’s one of the uniting forces of the universe, if you can only see it right!”

Tony made a sneezing noise. Agent Morse rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “If that’s how you’re playing it for now. Just beware, Miss Leewit. We are going to be keeping an eye on you. If we decide you’re messing with us, if you make problems, if you hold back when you could be helping us-” She cut off that last threat at a careful throat-clearing from Ms. Waters. “Go ahead and be a pain in the ass if it makes you feel better,” she said instead of whatever she’d been about to say. “Just know, you do not want anyone in this room to conclude that you’re a hostile. And we’ll be paying attention.”

The Leewit swallowed hard, making sure the Agent could see it. Tony sighed loudly. “Are we done here? I think we’re done here.”

It took them another half-hour to actually _be_ done, because there were papers to sign and more posturing to get out of the way. Tony agreed to keep SHIELD “in the loop” without specifying what, exactly, that meant. The Leewit agreed to provide a blood sample in the next few days. (Fat lot of good that would do them, clumping geneomancers. They were looking for traces of klatha in her DNA, so far as she could tell, but klatha DNA markers were made of klatha. If you weren’t a witch you couldn’t spot them, and if you were then you had better sources of information anyway.)

Tony congratulated her on her handling of the situation as he buzzed her through the air back toward the compound. The Leewit thanked him politely, because he seemed to be the biggest, baddest ally she had thus far managed to attach herself to. But it didn’t stop her from hearing her big sister Maleen’s voice in her head, hissing a warning as the three of them got hauled off in force-nets through Al-Pachbildur Spaceport, ages ago. _That’s an Imperial Slaver they’re taking us to. You have to watch yourself_ every second _on those things._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm cherry-picking my legal stuff here but then, so does MCU.
> 
> Tony is completely OK with limits and oversight unless it involves SHIELD Touching his Stuff. Because his background is academia and being corrected or overturned is what an authority is _for._
> 
> A fraction of a mael is a snek. Change my mind.
> 
> My beta got worried about the iron man bracelets being the wrong iteration but the Nano Suit gets a big debut scene later and when I asked them what came between bracelets and nano I didn't get an answer. So bracelets it is.


	9. The Leewit and Stark Tower

Having wrested her from the hands of the ATCU, (or maybe SHIELD was the right name – the Leewit still wasn’t sure) Tony’s attitude toward the Leewit returned to its baseline standard of benign neglect. His stated intention of “picking her brain” (and _boy,_ was the Leewit relieved to confirm that that was a metaphor) got derailed before they even got to the lab, as Tony interrupted the eighth semi-intelligible question he was firing at her to say, “You know what? We’re not there yet. We need more shared vocabulary.” At which point, he’d veered away from the corridor to the lab and put her in a much blander space, more like the conference room in the gatehouse, but with some 3-D imagers as well as the flat screen. “Work with Friday and see what you can teach yourself to do with my schematics program, to start with. And Fri, keep an ear open for interesting math and physics in whatever she says. We’ll meet up and chat later.”

Only, “later” had turned out to be late the next evening. The Leewit and Friday the robo-butler had gotten along just fine, slowly building a holographic representation of one of the _Venture’s_ antique Nova guns, but they’d barely gotten a start on the turret housing, let alone the guts of the machine, before it had been time for supper, which Tony did not attend, and then Friday had taken it upon herself to direct the Leewit to the gym – a room rather like the practice space aboard the _Petey B,_ with all kinds of equipment designed to be climbed or swung from or fallen on, together with weight and pulley systems for the training of single muscle groups and so on. The Leewit had stayed there until it was time for another shower (oooh, she was going to miss showers when she went back home) and bed. Then the next morning she found herself being bundled into a groundcar along with an assortment of Tony’s other possessions, to be transported to New York City, where Tony apparently had another residence, more responsibilities, and a fiancée.

The Leewit met a lot of other people that next day, including the driver of the car, the head of building security for Stark Tower, and someone called “Kelly from Aichar,” who explained the terms of the Leewit’s contract in a detail that the stuffiest bureaucrats of Nikkeldepain would have found exhausting. She smiled innocently at all of them and thanked them for helping her. Someone shoved a foan at her, which she didn’t really want except that she could use it to talk to Friday from outside the building, which would probably be a good thing. A Mrs. Long, “Call me Mary, Hon, and you let me know if you need anything else,” led her to another guest bedroom, much like the one at the compound except for being smaller and with only one shower jet. 

The drawers and closet in this new space held folded clothing someone had purchased for her – Friday talked her through the less-familiar nuances of which clothing items were intended to be worn under what circumstances, and the Leewit wondered who had thought she was going to need anything fancy, and why. Friday offered her guidance to another gym (much smaller than the one at the compound, but serviceable) and to a “Kaff” which proved to be another food-serving place, this one designed rather like the mess hall aboard the _Petey B_ except with about six times as many different options for meals. The Leewit was probably the youngest person there, but chatty nosiness seemed to be discouraged here: cooks and customers alike side-eyed her without asking questions. The Leewit caught herself sulking over her tray of aloo gobi and tucked her pouting lower lip back under her teeth. If she didn’t want to be treated like a baby any longer, she supposed that meant not getting petted, either. All in all, the Leewit was more relieved than not to settle herself back into her new room and go back to work on the nova gun schematic for a while, and she was very glad indeed to get an invitation, two hours later, to be invited to one of the upper levels to join Tony and his fiancée for a second supper.

The Leewit liked Pepper Potts immediately. The woman exuded an aura of calm and grace that, together with her red-gold hair, put the Leewit in mind of her eldest sister, Maleen. While she spoke nearly as quickly as Tony did, her words were pithy rather than scattershot, and the Leewit felt clearer-headed and less lost with every sentence. Pepper’s explanation of how the Leewit was expected to spend her day took a fifth as long as Kelly-from-Aichar’s and made three times as much sense. The woman didn’t seem warm, exactly, not in the way of Ms. Long, but neither did she seem hostile or challenging, and the Leewit had the impression that, like the Do Eldel, Pepper Potts would face any challenge that came her way with equanimity and dispatch it with extreme prejudice.

“Your contract is based on a standard workweek,” Pepper advised, “which is about eight hours – er – twenty-nine kiloseconds – per day, or a little under half a megasecond every fourteen days, which is a more useful metric when you’re in R&D since _people,_ ” and here she looked directly at Tony, “tend to go on marathon sessions and then crash rather than working a set schedule. You’ll have plenty of time to socialize, practice your… klatha, or explore the city as you choose. If you decide you want to go out and about you can borrow a Stark industries car and driver. Probably best, though, if you don’t go out alone until SHIELD calms down a little and finds a different butterfly to chase.”

The Leewit started to ask what kinds of things she should look at in the city, when Tony chose to demonstrate the unpredictable working hours expected of Arrendee consultants and took over the conversation again. “OK, so, the Nova gun thing is fascinating and I’ve got about a hundred questions I’ll have Friday pass along to you, but I’ve decided the more urgent question is the Egger route. What is it, who can use it, what’s the maximum power behind it, so on and so on. Because space-based weapons are not going to be much help if people can just open up a hole in the middle of, say, Washington D.C, and shove an army through. Even if the army has to have a ten-minute seizure before opening fire.”

The Leewit could see how that would be a problem. Especially given what Friday told her about the Chitauri invasion. She had all sorts of questions about the Tesseract herself, only she wasn’t quite sure how to ask. It sounded like the sort of thing some of the other, older witches could do something with if they knew about it… but it might not be worthwhile anymore. Karres wasn’t exactly an invading-army sort of place, really, and the Egger and the Sheewash did just fine for smaller-scale stuff.

“Egger’s a klatha thing,” she said aloud, “and not even all klatha users are good at it. Some witches can manage it, vatches… they don’t use it exactly, but they can see it, or something. Nartheby doesn’t Egger, far as I know. The… na- the worst of our klatha-using enemies don’t either. Um. You have to have klatha to use it, and sending anyone but yourself through the route takes a lot of power. Biggest thing ever to go through Eggerspace we’ve ever heard of was a single warship, and that’s assuming the rumors about how the Nuris got here are true.”

“So not a bigger problem than the Tesseract, then,” Tony concluded. “OK. Nova guns. They’re obviously not firing projectiles because Newton. So, are they… lasers? Microwaves? What’s the range on them?” And they were off.


	10. Klatha Language Skills Come In Handy Again.

Over the next week or so, the Leewit developed a loose routine. Since, two times out of three, Tony was either asleep or otherwise occupied when she was ready to start her day, she generally began with a trip to the gym. Her physical drills were an eclectic mix of stretches and tumbling from the circus, isometrics she’d learned from Ta’zaara, and actual fighting methods she’d picked up from Hulik and Vezzarn. (Ta’zaara would have been happy to help her with her self-defense, but his best moves were all intended for use by people both larger and more honorable than she was.) She had little use for all the pully-and lever machines in the SI gym, but the climbing wall was almost as much fun as the one out at the complex, and the sprung floor of the studio area let her get more height on her flips than she’d managed any time in the last six kilos or so of growth.

After exercise and a nice, long soak in the locker-room showers (less fancy than the guest-room ones, but still blissful,) the Leewit would make her way to the Kaff for a breakfast of eggs and either toast or waffles, depending on whether there was a longer line at the toaster or the waffle maker. (Because the Yarthian taste for weirdly elaborate machines to deal with simple parts of the day included breakfast, it seemed.) Her third day in, she discovered that the bottles labeled “Gatorade” that sat on a rack at one end of the Kaff tasted much like the familiar varieties of juice the Robo-butler on the _Venture_ provided. So after that she had proper orange juice with breakfast, or sometimes blue, not the bitter and primitive Yarthian version.

If, by that point, Tony was still asleep or otherwise occupied, the next order of business was to visit Mrs. Long, or some of the security staff, or the three old buffers who maintained the small fleet of SI company vehicles in the tower basement. Since the Leewit’s flattering and wide-eyed questions were always about “safe” subjects like the best places to go in the city or the ideal outcomes of various serial dramas, these people’s initial suspicion had warmed into something much friendlier. It warmed the Leewit inside, even as she squirmed a little inside every time one of her new pals called her “sweetie” or the equivalent. Part of her hated the way it came so easily to bat her eyelashes and skip and generally act about five years old.

Another part of her insisted firmly that making allies was a necessary activity, and that playing the baby didn’t mean she actually was one. Besides, it was good practice for klatha work, too. The housekeeping staff she tagged after spoke about three different languages among themselves. The security guards knew some things about reading people without language. Stan and his buddies in Fleet Maintenance didn’t seem to mind if she still didn’t know the difference between the distributor and the alternator because “her mind had wandered,” and the Leewit thought trying to do subtle klatha healing on Stan’s hardening arteries while he lectured her, without his noticing and without burning herself out, was a pretty good challenge.

Her time with Tony proved more frustrating. Interesting, certainly, but frustrating. She didn’t think either of them were getting any closer to their goals of (respectively) figuring out what Big Bossy the vatch wanted and saving Old Yarthe.

“So, Tinkerbell, most of the weapons you’re familiar with look like they do best in ship-to-ship engagements, not organized drives.”

“That’s ‘cause the _Venture’s_ a merchantman.” And scout, and courier, as needed, but the same principles applied.

“So how do you protect a planet from a space fleet? Is it all jousting, but just scaled up? Or drone ships? Or some kind of interrupter field that fries the tech on hostile vessels?”

Karres just got the adepts together and moved the planet away before the fleet arrived. But that wasn’t the answer Tony was looking for.

“Ideally,” he said, “the solution needs to be something we can throw together quickly, or by repurposing some of our current planet-based weaponry. Because we are gonna be outnumbered and, tech wise, probably outclassed. So that’s what we’re looking for.”

“You and everyone else in the galaxy,” the Leewit grumbled. After a minute, she said, “The Illmintrang Phantom ships use dimensional tunneling. They only have mass in the few seconds before they open fire and then they go back to mostly just being on the visible spectrum.”

Tony looked intrigued. “How does that work, exactly?”

“No idea.” The Leewit stood up and stretched. She wriggled her fingers, trying to dispel the Klatha itch that ran through her nerves. Perhaps trying to heal Stan had been a mistake. It had keyed up her medical senses to a degree that made it hard to ignore what a mess Tony Stark was. She could work on him the way she was working on Stan, except, first of all, she’d have to be touching him, and Tony didn’t like being touched. More importantly, though, Tony Stark was a _mess._ Trying to do anything at all without having another witch or three to draw from was just asking for burnout.

“Of fucking course you don’t.” Tony made a note about the phantom ships anyway, then abruptly shifted gears and started tinkering with the materials on his workbench again. 

The Leewit had thought at first that the engineer gave up easily, dropping anything that looked too hard. After a few days of watching him, though, she was beginning to think he switched tasks whenever he wanted to give his subconscious some elbow room. Having dismissed the question of ships for a moment, Tony rolled his desk chair to another screen entirely – a flat one rather than the holo-projections – and started paging through spreadsheets, clicking steadily and making the occasional snorting noise. “Hey, Kid,” he said after a few minutes, just as the Leewit was really settling in on the grav-tractor plans she was trying to remember from the one time she’d had to help Captain Pausert modify one, “What’s the gossip around the tower say about you, anyway? Does everyone assume you’re my illegitimate spawn, or what?”

Friday chimed over the intercom. “Ooer! Boss! Let me answer that one! Thirty percent of Security and nine percent of Custodial think she’s yours. Another twenty percent of Security and twelve percent of Engineering assume based on Her Wisdom’s coloring that she’s actually connected with Ms. Potts somehow. Stan in Fleet thinks perhaps she is either a daughter or a clone of Captain Rogers, being kept here both her for own safety and as leverage.”

Tony looked blank for a moment. “Stan from Fleet has imagination,” he announced, “I maybe ought to do something about that. Maybe PR can use him somehow?”

“He retired from PR before he moved to Fleet, boss.”

“Never mind.” Tony flapped a hand dismissively and bent over his pile of wires.

“And Ms. Long and her five best friends think ‘the Leewit of Karres’ is a Latverian title and that Her Wisdom is a political refugee.”

Tony grinned. “Latverian? I like that one; that’s cute.”

There was a chime and a hiss as the lab door slid open. Cl. Rhodes stood there, wearing leg braces and leaning on two canes that cuffed around his wrists. “What’s cute, now?”

Tony straightened and beamed, turning to greet his friend. “You are, of course, platypus! You come to join me in lamenting my inability to reverse-engineer a dimensional tunneler that hasn’t, technically, been invented yet?”

“Sounds fun, Tones, but I’m actually here to make you do your homework.” Rhodey grunted his way to one of the chairs near the door and then used his canes to steer as he rolled it over closer to Tony’s bench. “Or, officially, to inquire as to the progress on the code from those Doombots from last week.”

Tony made a farting noise with his tongue. “And I am doing this instead of Richards, why?”

“Because we want Sue to owe us a favor and talk to her extraterrestrial contacts, and we want Reed to keep working on the mini-black hole generators, and incidentally because this way we prove that Friday is smarter than he is?”

“Right,” Tony sighed, “grown up stuff. Well.” He tapped one of his flatscreens until it presented a solid block of small-font text. “We think we have a complete version of the code assembled from the remains of the captured bots. Since it’s really fucking weird to have a bunch of identical bots all self-destruct with different damage patterns, we’re using Trojan Horse protocols and being very, very careful about how we try to decrypt this stuff, so we don’t know yet what they were looking for.”

“Something bouncy,” the Leewit offered, peering over Tony’s shoulder at the screenful of code.

Both the men startled a little at the sound of her voice.

“Or stretchy,” the Leewit mused. “This part seems to be ways to measure elasticity, anyway.”

There was a silence. Friday played a sound clip of someone whispering, “Awkwaaaard.”

“You can just… read computer code,” Rhodey said flatly. “Encrypted computer code produced by an insane technopath who uses magic in his robots.”

The Leewit rolled her eyes. They’d been over this by now. “Every language ever. I told you.”

Tony snickered. Rhodey thumped one of his canes against the floor and set his head back on his shoulders so that he could look down his nose at the Leewit even though, seated, he was shorter than she was. “I must have missed the part where that meant there was no such thing as secure communications around her.”

“You kidding?” Tony stood up and started to pace. “This is going to be awesome. No more half-remembered schematics for you, kid, we are going to have plenty of ways to fill your time. Also, I take it if you can understand computer language you can talk back in it, right? So I am warning you...” Tony spun on his heel and stepped up into the Leewit’s space, his expression stern. “Do not mess with my bots.” He pointed a finger at the Leewit’s collarbone for emphasis. “Do. Not.”

The Leewit gulped. She hadn’t seen Tony this serious before, not even when he’d been facing down those agents. “Just because I can talk to computers doesn’t mean they’ll do what I say,” she said. Her voice came out a little squeakier than she’d meant it to. “I can’t just say, 'tell me what the password is.' Not unless it’s a really dumb computer.”

“Even dumber than DUM-E, Boss,” Friday added.

Tony loosened his posture immediately. “OK, see, we’re fine,” he said. “Leewit, I’m gonna have you work with Friday on her top-priority decryption projects when I don’t need you for other stuff. Don’t give me that face – I am paying you better than at least eighty percent of the adults on Planet Earth for your time.”

“Tones, no,” Rhodes said. They ignored him.

“It’s just that computers are so boring!” The Leewit whined. “Saying anything in the digital languages takes forever! And I bet most of your secret decryption stuff turns out to be boring too. Timesheets and shipping manifests and things. It’s not like people really write lists that say things like ‘Top Secret Taking Over The Galaxy To-Do List.’” The Leewit made finger quotes in the air, a gesture that she was quite taken with. Karres had no equivalent for it, and, as a bonus, it meant _lousy chumpox carrier_ in Pampassi.

“Tony,” Rhodes tried again.

“See, that’s why I want you working with Friday. She picks samples for you to decode, you translate them into oh, C++ or something else she can work with but won’t take over her servers, and she uses those as a Rosetta stone to complete the decryption algorithm faster and do the deep data-mining.”

“TONY!!” Rhodes shouted. “Cool it!”

“Whaaat!” Tony spun back toward his friend, irritated. “You’ve got to see how much time this is going to save!”

“Tones,” Rhodes looked actually angry, nostrils flared and brows down. “This is not just a cool new decryption bot you’ve picked up somewhere from a hacker friend. This is a teenage girl. One you just went a lot of trouble to keep out of the hands of the ATCU.”

“Yeah, but...”

“What do you think happens when someone else figures out what she’s doing for you? How quick does her kidnapping risk spike? What happens when you put her to work on something you’re not even supposed to have? Because I’m very careful not to ask about how much of Ross’ stuff you’re trying to hack into, but I know you. I give it two days, max, before you run into a Coventry problem.”

“And that’s another reason to keep Friday as primary, with the Leewit providing cheat codes,” Tony insisted, but the manic edge had gone from his voice, and he stopped handwaving, folding himself back onto his workbench again instead. “But yeah, we don’t want to be too good. Fri, maybe stick to two-three hours a day or less, at first? That’s about… fifteen kiloseconds, Leewit.”

“I _know,_ ” the Leewit complained, “I can multiply by three point three as easy as you can divide by it. What’s a Coventry problem?”

“There was a war, a few decades back,” Rhodes said softly, “where the commanders had to make a choice at one point between letting the city of Coventry be bombed or giving away the fact that they’d cracked the enemy’s cypher algorithm. They picked the first one.”

“Oh.” The Leewit felt herself shrink a little. That was the problem, sometimes, with picking the biggest, baddest, ally you could find. It didn’t take much to pick up extra enemies along with. Bigger and badder than Big Bossy the vatch, though? And there was always the Egger route. Unless the vatch had blocked it, somehow, which Big Bossy could absolutely do. The question was, if Big Bossy ‘had a task’ for her, would it care if she got killed before she did it? Because if things got bad, she’d Egger, vatch or no. But not if the vatch stopped her and if… _Stoppit,_ she told herself. _Just stop. No thinking in circles._ “Well,” she said aloud, “You’re the one who’s paying.”


	11. Central Park is Good for the Leewit's Vocabulary

For all Peter’s excitement at the idea of a team-up with the Leewit for “hero-y type things,” it turned out that their powers didn’t mesh all that well together. Her most useful whistles did weird things to his enhanced senses, and he didn’t need her healing (which she still wasn’t admitting she could do, anyway.) While she was a competent enough skirmisher, the Leewit’s best fighting skills involved extremely long-distance weapons that hadn’t been invented yet, and she wasn’t good enough on the ground to contribute much that Spider-man couldn’t already do faster. Add to that a quirk of her language skills that meant she could breeze through encryption without trying but had to learn gang slang and police ten-codes just like anyone else (“I know what the words mean, but that doesn’t mean I know what the words mean to _them,_ ”) and a Spider-man/Leewit teamup on the streets became a “maybe someday” goal, though playing around with the trapezes and Peter’s webs in the gym was still a lot of fun.

Things went better in the labs. Peter knew enough about computers to follow a little bit of what the Leewit and Friday were doing with their decrypting, though he said his friend Ned would be better at it. Also, the Leewit’s confident assumption that a klatha healer ought to take to biochemistry like a flurb to water was… not entirely misplaced. It wasn’t easy. The elaborations of carbon-based molecules did not just snap into her head the way new klatha patterns did when she was ready for them. But it made sense. Each new piece built on the ones before, like astrogation math, and the pieces… fit. The Leewit found herself thinking of nucleotides as she tried to sneak teeny healing patterns into Stan from Fleet, or Cl. Rhodes, and it… worked. The patterns felt more solid. The new klatha things the Maleen coaching pattern in her head showed her came in clearer. She doubted she could have explained the connection to someone like Pausert, but the Leewit could tell that the study of “orgo” was doing her good.

Besides, Peter was really appealing when he got to play mentor. He got wide-eyed and excited and stopped worrying about whether his wide-eyed excitement was too, as he put it, “loseresque.” He bounced between down-to-yarthe explanations of the difference between a virus and a prokaryote and high-flung speculations about the advantages and perils of engineering microbes that could help reintegrate polyvinyl chloride into the yarthian ecosystem without poisoning everything. Behind the puppyish demeanor that reminded the Leewit of a very young witch on their first trip Roundabout, she could start to see the person Peter might grow up to be, even if he was, by Karres standards, growing up very slowly.

Honestly, though, the Leewit enjoyed Peter the most when neither of them were working. It was Peter who most often accompanied the Leewit outside the confines of the Stark Industries building, who introduced her to the broad spectrum of Yarthian music and food, who recited the plots of his favorite movies and showed them off. A few of the movies were even properly 3D. Old Yarthe had been quite a bit more sophisticated than the Leewit had ever realized. The Leewit quite liked the movies that took place on spaceships, of which Peter had many, but the ones about ‘zombies’ gave her nightmares, and she only got through the first ten minutes of an older one called _The Andromeda Strain_ before Peter had to coax her down from the top of a bookshelf and switch to a musical instead. _Hairspray_ made no sense whatsoever, but the Leewit sat through the whole thing with both arms wrapped tightly around Peter and her head pressed back against his shoulder, until she felt better. Peter let her do that, though he kept making awkward creaking sorts of noises and muttering about Emjay.

Peter introduced her to a round, amiable person called Ned, who knew most of Peter’s secrets and barely blinked when Peter told Ned that the Leewit was a time traveler. Her whistles and languages were, Ned told her, “neat,” but “not cool enough to be, like, in the top twelve X-men.”

Ned also got Peter to relax a little about how much the Leewit stood out among the general populace. “This is New York, dude, only, like, four fashion bloggers are going to care that she’s wearing Velcro boots.” He did try, and fail, to persuade the Leewit to alter her name. “I mean, not even Cher calls herself ‘the’ Cher, OK?” The Leewit simply looked down her nose at him and watched him deflate. 

Emjay, when the boys were finally willing to introduce the two girls to each other, proved to be made of much sterner stuff. They all got together on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, early in the period Peter and Ned referred to as “spring break,” at the 110th Street subway station. Peter and Ned and a girl who was as tall as the do Eldel and with much the same coloring as a Nartheby Sprite, though with less hair, all emerged from the stairwell carrying, as promised, recreational transporters called “skateboards.” The Leewit had borrowed one from Ms. Long, who had, she claimed, “shredded” back in the day. Ned wore a helmet and bumpy padding at his elbow and knee joints and looked uncomfortable.

“Emjay, this is… Lee,” Peter said, fidgeting, “Uh, Lee Karres. She’s from – well, she’s got a Stark internship, too? And she’s an exchange student from… Bosnia?”

The Leewit and Emjay pinned him with matching glares. “Bosnia’s not even a real place, dumbass,” Emjay announced. “It’s a made-up name from the old _Escapist_ comics that they used so Latveria and Sokovia and Orsinia wouldn’t get all mad at AMR.”

In equally frigid tones, the Leewit said, “I am _the_ Leewit, _of_ Karres.”

Emjay turned her (habitual?) glare from the cringing Peter to the Leewit. “you’re… what?”

“The Leewit. Of Karres.”

Emjay rolled her eyes. “And I’m the Akhund of Swat. Whatever. C’mon, let’s get going.” She dropped her board, hard enough for the clatter of it hitting the ground to emphasize her annoyance but not hard enough to endanger the thing, and glided into the park with a rumble of wheels. Peter and Ned looked after her, then turned back to watch the Leewit mount her own board, to make certain she wasn’t going to fall over.

It was harder than it looked, the Leewit would admit, but not _that_ hard. Managing a skateboard required the same understanding of balance, momentum, and proprioperception as tumbling or aerobatics. She already knew balance boards. Moving on one with evenly distributed wheels was only a small stretch. Steering was… well, she disturbed a nice assortment of Manhattanites in the first couple hundred meters, but she got the hang of it, and she didn’t have any trouble keeping up with her three native guides after that.

In fact, the Leewit thought she might actually be better than Ned already. Peter’s friend chugged along determinedly, reddish about the face and damp under the arms, switching out his paddle and pivot feet at much smaller intervals than the other two did. The Leewit, by comparison, now felt comfortable enough to take some of her attention away from the management of her board and direct it to the sights of Central Park.

Most of these sights were people. Peter and Emjay pointed out particular ones to each other, which helped the Leewit get a better sense of what was and wasn’t normal and gave her a whole slew of new words that were too specific to have automatically downloaded into her klatha-enhanced English vocabulary. She still didn’t quite get what difference, if any, there was between a “cholo,” a “gangsta,” or a “banger,” but “busker” seemed to be a word for the occasional sideshow act that cropped up along their route, and “hawker” was a person selling things. There did not seem to be a particular word that applied to the herd of small children, wearing identical bright-pink tunics and clinging to a length of some kind of cable, that all made their way eastward along one of the side paths. 

There did seem to be a word, but probably not a polite one, for the healthy-looking woman in tight, stretchy clothes who trotted down the path while pushing a conveyance rather like a hammock suspended in a triangular, wheeled frame. A small child sat in the hammock, surveying their surroundings with an impassive expression. Both Peter and Ned craned their necks a bit as the woman passed by them, and Emjay glowered. “If either of you even thinks the word ‘milf’ I will cut you.” Both boys gabbled frantic denials.

“We’re not that stupid,” said Ned.

“Or assholes,” said Peter.

“Or that,” Ned agreed.

“What was that thing she was pushing?” the Leewit interrupted, hoping to defuse the tension with a change of subject. 

Which made her the object of Emjay’s glare, this one being the _I don’t believe this_ glare rather than the _prepare to die_ glare. Emjay actually stopped her board so she could glare better, making the other three stop too. “You’ve really never seen a jogging stroller before? Were you raised in a cult?”

“I told you,” Peter began unwisely, “she’s an exchange student from--”

“From Made-upnia, yeah, you said,” Emjay cut him off. “But I have internet friends in Eastern Europe and they know what a jogging stroller is.”

“Um,” said the Leewit, “My family travels a lot. We miss out on things sometimes.”

“Army brat?” Ned suggested, trying to be helpful.

“Shipping,” the Leewit said. “And… we traveled with a circus for a while.”

“Whoa!” Ned said, “Cool!” But Emjay still looked dubious and the Leewit didn’t really blame her.

After that, the Leewit tried to keep her mouth shut and just look around. She kept it up until they arrived at a bright blue swimming pool called "the Rink." It was set into a rise of ground, with shallow cement steps leading up to it on either side and a broader paved region below. Quite a few people were practicing skateboard moves on one set of steps, to the annoyance of the people carrying bags of things up toward the pool. Peter rolled eagerly into the mix of people standing on wheeled things while Emjay and Ned settled on a nearby bench. Emjay dug a book and a pencil out of her backpack and began to sketch. Ned simply collapsed and sucked at a water bottle for a while, but then eventually dug his foan out of a pocket.

Though Peter beckoned the Leewit toward the Rink, (or at least that was what that wild wave of his arm probably meant,) she, too dug out her foan, and the earpiece that went with it. She pushed her left thumb rather than her right against the verification square and heard Friday’s voice chime in the earpiece. “How can I help you, Your Wisdom?”

“Can I text instead?” She didn’t want Emjay catching her asking more stupid questions.

“Of course, Your Wisdom.”

So the Leewit spent a good kilosecond taking pictures with her foan, like any good exchange student from Made-upnia, and Friday chirped in her ear, teaching her the different Yarthian names for wheeled conveyances that were not cars or trucks.

The Leewit soon wished she hadn’t. Clearly, there was no taxonomy of wheels. The two-wheeled ones were called “bicycles,” which made sense, unless they were propelled by kicking at the ground instead of pumping at a foot-powered crank; then they were called scooters. Motorized three-wheeled vehicles that mostly held very fat people were also scooters. Foot-cranked three-wheeled vehicles were either tricycles or pedicabs. Wheeled carriers pushed in front of a person were either called strollers or walkers (it took the Leewit four tries to understand that those were two different words – they translated the same in her head) depending on whether they held children or small baskets. Wheeled shoes were skates, or rollerblades, or heelies, depending on the location and arrangement of the wheels. (Those all looked _fun_ and the Leewit determined that she would purchase some as soon as was feasible.)

The Leewit gave herself a shake and tucked her foan safely next to Emjay’s backpack, though she left the earbug, with Friday’s voice, tucked in place. “I want to learn to do more things with the skateboard,” she announced. She tilted her borrowed board back down from its tail to its wheels and prepared to make her way to the rink. 

Emjay slapped her book closed over the pencil and heaved herself up from her artistic hunch. “Ned,” she commanded, “give the Made-upnian ambassador your helmet and pads so she doesn’t get killed.”

“Uh,” said Ned.

“You can stay here and watch our stuff.”

“Right, right,” Ned nodded rapidly and started pulling at the straps of his right kneepad. “Only,” he explained, “the helmet might be a little gross right now? Because sweating. And might not fit. Because...”

“Because your enormous loser noggin,” Emjay supplied helpfully. “We can add a bandanna or something.”

“If it helps,” the Leewit said, “I already know how to fall safely.” She demonstrated by kicking forward with the wrong foot, shooting the board out from under her into a shrub and herself backward onto the pavement. She tucked her head and one shoulder so she rolled sideways this time instead of heels over head. “I’ve been getting a lot of practice lately,” she added as she got back to her feet.

“Yuh-huh,” Emjay said thoughtfully, but she jerked out a peremptory hand and Ned set the first kneepad into it.

Peter skidded up to them, looking panicked. “Leewit? Are you OK? It looked like you lost control over your board. You need a band-aid or anything?”

Emjay shot him a glare. The Leewit wondered if the other girl was jealous. “She was showing us that she knows how to fall over.”

“Oh,” Peter said nervously, eyes flicking back and forth between his older friend and his new one. “Yeah, she does. She showed me at- at SI when we were um, testing some… Stuff.”

The Leewit contemplated the awkwardness inherent in trying to strap something tightly to one’s own elbow, and then reached out to Ned to have him do it.

Emjay rolled her eyes again. “Fine. We’ll start slow. If the Made-upnians file a protest I’m blaming you.”

“Sure!” Peter’s relief was obvious, though why he might be relieved escaped the Leewit’s comprehension right then. “OK, Leewit, let’s get over to the rink. Um, you coming too, Emjay?”

The Leewit bent her arms and legs experimentally, testing the fit of the joint pads, and went to collect her board out of the shrub. Emjay grabbed her own board. Peter opened his mouth to say something else.

Several things happened at once after that. FRIDAY pinged in the Leewit’s ear. " Your Wisdom, I would advise evacuating from- " There was a shrieking, roaring noise overhead, like a fanderbag being dropped off a cliff, and a crack that could have been thunder or a sonic boom. Just about everyone in the park looked up to see a huge, bright… thing… traveling too fast to make out clearly but easily the size of a shipping container, streaking across the sky to land with an enormous splash in the center of Harlem Meer. Seconds later, the air filled with stinking gray steam and the cries of the park-goers it enveloped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to Bosnia. Bonus Aging Nerd points if you recognized the Escapist, or remember what AMR is short for.


	12. The Leewit's First Superhero Op

The steam dissipated within a half-dozen heartbeats. Already the wail of sirens grew nearer, as the beat cops who had taken notice of the light in the sky started to move in to establish a perimeter. The Leewit slowly lowered her hands from her ears, where Friday still made concerned noises. (The Leewit spared a moment to admire the tech that hadn’t fried itself in the face of… whatever that had been.)

“… Have to get out of here! Come _on!”_ Ned yelled from a hundred yards down the path.

Peter must have just about levitated from the rink stairs to the little pile of backpacks. He had his looped over his shoulder and was swiveling his neck around, eyes darting from shrub to tree to bench. He’d explained once to the Leewit that finding an appropriate place to change costumes was just about the first thing he did in these situations. “People could be hurt!” Peter yelled back in Ned’s direction, “We’ve gotta --”

“How are we standing upright?” Emjay’s frustrated howl might have been addressed to the boys or possibly just the universe at large. “How did that crash not flatten trees in the blast wave? How are we not just red smears?” 

“ _And_ there’s still water in the lake,” the Leewit agreed, backing Peter-wards to recover her foan and show FRIDAY what was going on. 

“Not water,” Emjay said faintly, and after two more blinks, tugged the Leewit’s elbow and took off sprinting after Ned.

The Leewit jerked herself loose. Once she had her foan she sprinted, too, but for the nearest tree, not the pavement. They were all acting on instinct, here, and there was no reason to think Emjay’s methods were better than the Leewit’s. Besides from the tree, she could get a view of the water-that wasn’t. She clung to the slender trunk with one hand and raised her foan with the other. Not a few other people were doing similar things, she noticed, while others, in the heavy uniforms of the New York Police, urged them away.

Emjay was right about one thing, at least: that was not water. The green surface of Harlem Meer roiled and seethed in far too gelatinous a fashion to be water, moving in ripples out to the banks and then heaving up over the sides in a thick ooze, deceptively quickly. As the ooze moved out from the lakebed, it separated into individual blobs, each one about the size of a twenty-liter keg, that picked up speed as they bowled outward.

The first few were a green-brown that suggested they had simply coalesced out of the lake water, but they didn’t stay that way. Even as the Leewit watched, one of them shed the mat of duckweed and mud that coated it, leaving a long smear on the ground behind it and emerging nearly colorless. Another did the same but left a green circle on its top, like a beret. The disc of green stayed more-or-less in place even as the blob beneath it rolled along at a good twenty kph. Some other blobs maintained long wisps of pondweed inside, or silvery spanglings of minnows, like the streaks in a cats-eye marble. One had engulfed a luckless half-grown gosling, its feathers mostly scalded off by the impact of the … the impact… and its long neck and legs rearranging themselves sickeningly in the blob’s internal currents as it moved.

The Leewit determined that her instincts had probably been better than Emjay’s. The fastest blobs were moving faster than she could run, but she still hadn’t seen any sign that they could climb… Even as she thought that, one blob slithered its way up between the slats of a wooden bench under her tree, where it engulfed a paper bag and a bright yellow toy truck. It sat there for a moment, pulsing, while the bag slowly drifted upside-down toward the top of the blob and then fluttered back down to the bench, leaving behind the orange, fish-shaped crackers it had held. The toy truck settled itself to one side, still quite enblobbed but not touching the crackers, some of which began to dissolve.

“Great Patham!” the Leewit whispered, half to herself and half to Friday. “That looked deliberate! Those blobs are making choices!”

“I’ll pass that information to the response team, Your Wisdom. Mr. Parker and Mr. Stark have both asked if you’re all right. Mr. Parker advises that Mr. Leeds and Miss Jones have headed home via the subway. Mr. Stark advises that you are to ‘keep your ass where it is,’ if you are safe enough. He and the Fantastic Four are en-route.”

“Got it,” the Leewit panted, watching the blob on the bench. It started to climb up the back of the bench, bridging itself over the gaps it had previously oozed through and extending narrow pseudopodia that twined themselves around the base of the Leewit’s tree. “Oh, _beelzit!”_ Without much hope, she aimed her most disorienting whistle at it: one designed for organic discomfort. The blob rippled with the vibration but kept moving.

The Leewit scrambled frantically backward, downward, and outward, trying to find a protruding branch low enough to jump off that would not land her among any other blobs.

Only then did she think to look around and see if the blobs were attacking other humans. A quick scan of the park showed many running figures, in many directions. The blobs seemed to mostly ignore and avoid the police officers, but not everyone was so lucky. A woman about Maleen’s age was trapped by one of her tall, shiny, high-heeled boots. She shook the foot wildly, shouting, while the blob wobbled but persisted, edging a tendril out from its lower half toward her other boot. In another direction, a toddler engulfed up to the long-necked inflatable toy at its waist shrieked in distress while a scrawny man in loose clothing tried to pull it free. That pair were soon joined by a bright red-and-blue blur, who grabbed the man about the chest and gave a prodigious yank, sending all three of them: baby, father, and Spider-Man, over backward. The Leewit couldn’t make out what the three said to each other, but Spider-Man pointed, the wide-eyed man picked up his kid and ran, and Spider-Man shot a web up into another tree.

The Leewit turned her eye back to the boots woman. Was Peter going to get her free next? Instead, though, the grass near the woman’s feet began to smolder as a bright light came swooping low. A loud, oddly resonant voice called, “Heeeere’s Johhny!” and the light resolved into a man, older than Peter but younger than Pausert, in tight blue clothing and with flames dancing around his hands. “Shame on you, Mr. Blobby,” the man declaimed, “Darcy here is _my_ girl.” 

The hiss of the blob as he directed his flames in its direction nearly drowned out the woman’s wry response of, “I’m your girl _this_ week, anyway. Dude, that reeks!”

“Then this is a very special week for you,” the man grinned back – was his voice being amplified somehow? — and swept the girl up into his arms to dash off again.

“Leewit!” Peter cheered, landing on the branch she was clinging to, “there you are! Sorry I’m late, Friday and Karen were trying to triangulate your position from the phone pictures and then there was that dude and his kid and… Um, wanna lift?”

“Sure,” the Leewit agreed, clambering up on Peter’s back and wrapping her legs around his waist, “how’s it going, anyway?”

“Um, pretty… good, for, y’know, a few thousand blob monsters showing up in Central Park.” Peter bounced thoughtfully on the end of their branch, then shot a stream of webbing over to the next tree. “There’s a perimeter set up, we’re scrambling, like, blow torches and things to herd the blobs into a couple of shipping containers… It all sounds a lot crazier than it is.”

It did all sound pretty crazy, the Leewit admitted to herself. Swinging along with Peter gave her little attention to spare from the wind whipping in her face and the constant adjustments of balance and momentum needed to keep her seat. The brief periods where he ran out of trees and sprinted with her across flat ground were, if anything, even more disorienting. Voices rose and ebbed around her: the crackle of radios, angry shrieks, hissing steam and the distant whine of Iron Man’s repulsors, here and there a few intelligible phrases. “Oh, hell, no, Bee-yotch. You let go _right_ the fuck now.” “What’s going on? Where’s the rendezvous point?” “Three Echo Ninety-six staging by the playground...” “Oh my GOD! He killed Keni!” “Hey, it’s my party and I’ll fry if I want to! Flame ON!” “Please, can you help? I’m scared. You’re friendly, right? You smell friendly…”

The problem with using your klatha language skills every waking minute was you didn’t always notice how many languages you were eavesdropping in. The Leewit reared back with a sudden gasp. “Wait! Peter! Stop! _Stop!”_

Peter slammed into the next tree rather inelegantly. “ _Don’t call me that when I’m in the mask!_ ” he hissed.

The Leewit shook her head, a little dizzy with the shock of their landing. “Pe-” she stopped herself, “listen, I just figured out – I’m getting snatches of language from the blobs. The blobs are talking!” She clutched at his neck, a little wildly. Peter coughed and the Leewit deliberately unclenched her fingers. “It’s chemical,” she babbled, “scent-based, like with ants, but a much more complicated grammar. Most of the blobs are just confused and scared.”

“You sure?” Peter asked, and then answered himself, “ ‘Course you are. You get that, Karen? Leewit says we’ve got sentience.”

Peter’s earpiece was muffled by the suit; the Leewit couldn’t make anything of the replies, unless the flaming man’s amplified “Oh, fuck me,” was in response to Peter’s remark.

“So,” Peter turned to the Leewit. “If you can understand them, can you tell them to, like, hold still and stop scaring people?”

The Leewit rolled her eyes “Just because I can understand it doesn’t mean I can just… stink on command!” This was always the tricky part with non-Klatha users. They saw how some things were easy for witches and didn’t get how it just gave you whole new hard things to have to do. Like now, for instance, she was trying to translate an utterly new smell-vocabulary in her head, find the words in it that meant something useful, then translate those back into Yarthian chemical terms. It wasn’t as though she’d spent her childhood training her nose in the Kell Peak essence refinery, for Patham’s sake! 

A strange voice spoke up in the Leewit’s ear – male, older than the flaming boy. “We allegedly have help coming in,” the voice on the foan assured her. “Anything you can assist with in the meantime is helpful, miss- er- Your Wisdom, but please don’t feel as if the whole mess is on your shoulders.”

“Yeah,” Storm’s voice broke in from the background. “If all else fails we can just keep boiling the assholes.”

“Quiet,” the Leewit groused. She plucked the little button out of her ear, trying to concentrate. The Maleen pattern in her mind opened up, showing her a Klatha working for finding rare ingredients for ointment. If she combined that with her natural language talents… a minute or two later, the Leewit put the button back in her ear and said, “OK. You there?”

“Do you have something?” The voice was crisp. 

“Their neutral sent is kind of like canned tunafish. That, plus squashed banana peels, plus wet dog might work as a sort of, please wait here and we’ll be with you shortly, kind of a thing. Um, and the… the really bendy plastic that they use to make those thick balloon rings people float on in the pool? That… they like that smell. It smells… friendly to them.”

“Acknowledged,” said the foan voice.

A second or two later, the flaming man’s voice echoed over the park. “Intelligent vinyl fetish blob monsters. Got it.”

Peter snickered and then grew abstracted. “Vinyl,” he mused, “Oh. Oh, that makes sense! I mean, why the aldehydes are comforting I have no clue, but… the float ring, and the… the boots, and… they weren’t trying to eat anyone, really, were they?”

The Leewit shrugged. “I mean, now that we’ve boiled a whole bunch of them they might be mad, but...”

“But mostly they’re more, like, ‘please good sir, don’t leave me here,’ right?”

“Something like that,” said the Leewit.

“Awesome! I think you just saved the day!” Peter shot another web that he used to lower them both to the ground. “C’mon, we’re about three blocks from another subway stop.” He led the Leewit over a couple of low mounds of mulch, offered a knee to let her jump a low wire fence, then hopped over it himself. The sidewalk on the other side was dense with displaced park-goers, policemen, and gawkers. 

A warbling siren note heralded the arrival of a heavily motorized version of a bicycle that sped toward the current blob nexus. The rider, too, was heavily armored, and towing a bulky net bag full of the thick balloons Peter called “vinyl,” mostly shaped like hammers, though there were some vaguely man-shaped blobs printed in the same pattern as Tony’s exo-suit, and some others in green.

“Fuckin’ aliens, man,” complained the driver of a non-motored bicycle with a boxy metal compartment in the front. It had tipped over as he tried to dodge the uniforms.

“No kiddin’,” said someone else. “Hey, you got any fudgesicles in that thing?”

The further they got from the north end of the park, the fewer gawkers there were and the more the flow of foot traffic went in the same direction as Peter and the Leewit were going. Peter dodged back over the fence at one point and reemerged a few meters downstream, mask removed and costume hidden under baggy clothes too warm for the weather. Excited voices on their foans recounted a mix of adventures with the Blobs of Harlem Meer. One luckless man in a rumpled shirt and tie tried to make his way northward against the crowd, leading a scrawny, decrepit-looking dog with reddish, clumpy fur. “This is exactly the kind of thing you guys hired me to try and prevent,” he complained to the air. “ _Exactly._ A gradual introduction, I said. We had a _plan._ And I cannot do my job if you guys will not _listen_ to me!”

“I know, Tom,” the dog said, “I know. And I promise you I will raise a stink about this. Literally.”

Peter stopped short. The Leewit nearly ran into him. “That was a talking dog,” he said.

The Leewit blinked. “Do you not have those?” she asked, and they started walking toward the subway again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Leewit's trolling Peter a bit here; talking dogs exist in her time but aren't widely known there/then, either.
> 
> Bonus Aging Nerd Points if you know the name of _this_ talking dog. (HInt: I stuck him on the wrong coast for this cameo.)


	13. The Leewit vs. Ms Oh

To the Leewit’s disappointment, neither she nor any of her Yarthian friends had much to do with the blobs after their arrival. The creatures did have a translator or two among them already, it seemed, so the Leewit’s services were not required. She never found out why the translators hadn’t arranged things better at first contact, nor why the blobs came to Central Park, or much else, either. Tony complained briefly and loudly about the state of the alien spacedrive; the blobs were, it turned out, very laid-back sorts of people, being all but immune to aging and highly adaptable, and had never felt the need to do more than toddle along at barely triple the speed of sound in a ship that was more like a warm comet than anything else. The implications for chemistry, ecology, and most of the other bio-sciences looked to be very exciting, but the so-called Yeeherak solution to planetary threats seemed to be the same as the Karres one: get the planet, or whatever passed for one, out of the way.

Rhodes did ask the Leewit if she had any knowledge of this or similar races from her own time, but she didn’t. She could only suppose that Yeeherak were among the many, many races that vanished during the plague wars, before the Yarthian Diaspora. Those same wars, the Leewit realized with a sick lurch of her innards, might well be going on right now, only a solar system away from where she was. Or not. Her understanding of BYD history was awfully spotty and episodic. She knew Nartheby sprites had visited Yarthe during a time when the natives worked stone and tin but not iron, and then gone away again, and then come back. She knew teeny bits and pieces of what went on on Yarthe itself. She had a sort of general timeline for when various planets had fallen victim to the plague, though the accuracy of said timeline was very much in doubt, given the secrecy involved. She knew far, far too much about the life of the Great Patham. She didn’t have a clear picture of which bits lined up with which. Had Arvin Warmaker already closed the gates of Castle Aloorn and given orders to fire on the refugee ships? Had that happened a hundred years ago? A hundred years from now? The most skilled of the Adepts now believed that the plague had been a made thing, not an accident. Was the vatch’s “Mad one,” or Tony’s alien army commander (if they weren’t the same person) behind the Leewit’s worst nightmare, too?

The Leewit did her best to squash her useless fretting and focus on the mission at hand. The return of the plague, the possible continued existence and unknown intentions of its creator, those were all big-picture things, for the Adepts, not a Roundabouter. The crew of the Venture had already done more than the average witch to counteract it, what with recruiting the _Petey B_ into the fold, to say nothing of the little vatches. The mission at hand, she figured, was to figure out what Big Bossy the vatch wanted and get off this crazy ancient dirtball and back home as fast as she could. That much, at least, her hosts seemed to agree with, and to that end they insisted that she expand her vaguely defined consulting duties to include regular visits to a place called “the Sanctum,” on Bleecker Street, to talk magic with the Sorcerer Supreme.

^^^^^^^^^^^

Actually, it was usually Wong or some of the other lesser magicians who worked with the Leewit. The Sorcerer Supreme seemed to be nearly as busy as the Daal of Uldune, and he had less help. Also, the Leewit was given to understand, some of the other denizens of the Sanctum understood magic much better than Dr. Strange did, even if they couldn’t use it as well.

They and the Leewit completely failed to impress each other. Wong had looked physically pained when the Leewit informed him that none of the material in the first few grimoires he brought out looked very familiar at all, and that Karres never wrote that kind of thing down anyway. Half of it just came to you if you were a hot enough witch, and the other half passed from person to person. She thought the librarians of Kamar Taj were stuffy old fusspots.

Wong, in turn, thought the Leewit was a degenerate. “How does _Go tsao de_ Shakespeare survive to your time and not the Govindan Ascendancy?”

Strange had his own insight: “From what you have shown me, the magic of Karres is like one of those remote islands where a few birds, a shipwrecked family of rats, and an unusually open-minded sea turtle have evolved to fill an entire ecology. Your magic most closely resembles the chaos magic of the witches, but that’s like saying a hamster is more like a giraffe than it is like a shark. I believe that something terrible must happen between our time and yours, to so devastate our magical heritage that your people have had to reinvent so much.”

The Leewit rolled her eyes and batted away the floating teapot near her elbow. Just because she couldn’t port things like Goth did wasn’t any reason to sniff at her like this. “That’s assuming your time turns into mine. It might not. We might be from different streams. Happens … well, a lot, in the Chaladoor, and that was where I was when the vatch grabbed me. Dread Moander came to our time from another stream, same thing with the cannibals; stands to reason that kind of thing isn’t just one-way.”

Strange tapped his hands together as if he were trying to steeple his shaking fingers. “That is very interesting, and if I ever have a spare moment I may wish to visit this Chaladoor, but I assure you that our time does turn into yours. Among the other times that ours turns into. I have learned this much from the Eye.”

The Sorcerer Supreme might have intended this assurance to give the Leewit a greater sense of ownership over the remote problems of Old Yarthe and encourage her to work harder at reconciling their magics. Instead, though, she clammed up, frightened. She wasn’t about to accidentally trigger the unknown horrors Dr. Strange referenced or the known horrors of the plague wars by running her mouth. And she wasn’t about to give out key intelligence about Klatha or Karres unless she knew exactly who or what was making use of it. The plague was a made thing, she reminded herself. Perhaps it had been intended for use against something like the disciplined and educated ranks of Kamar Taj and had overlooked the looser and stealthier workings of Karres until they were the only force left to oppose it. Or perhaps it had been made in somewhere like Kamar Taj, part of an internal war or an external one. But whatever the plague and its makers knew about Karres, they weren’t going to find out from the Leewit. She hoped.

“I don’t suppose you’d tell me whether it would be a better idea to teach them some things or just let them stew,” she grumbled aloud when she thought she relled Big Bossy the vatch nearby. 

A quake of amusement shook through her. **WHAT KIND OF EGGLING TO YOU TAKE ME FOR, TO IMAGINE I’D ANSWER A QUESTION LIKE THAT?**

“Yeah,” the Leewit sighed, “that’s what I figured.”

She wanted to help them, they wanted her help, but there was only so much small-picture stuff she could do, and the big-picture stuff… vocabulary was a problem. 

Vatches seemed like a useful thing for these uptimers to know more about. Vatches thought linear time was “silly,” so the Leewit wasn’t spoiling anything by talking about them. Chances were anyone using klatha in the amounts the sorcerers threw about had encountered at least a few. She suspected that quite often vatches were what magical wards were warding against. But it was hard to be sure, even if the sorcerers had much more patience than, say, Tony, with descriptions like “invisible black thing, and the smart ones have silver eyes.” Big Bossy kept out of relling distance whenever the Leewit went to the Sanctum, so she couldn’t just say, “There! Can you rell that?” 

The other big thing the Leewit knew about was Egger Space. Though… knowing about it didn’t necessarily mean she could answer questions about it. It was useful. It was really useful. If you knew your coordinates (which was a whole ‘nother thing) you could go just about any where-or-when in spacetime. Vatches… interacted with Egger Space in some way or other – Pausert’s pet Little Bit had caught them mid-journey once when the Captain had been mucking around with the pattern and got the whole ship marooned on a point of… you couldn’t call it spacetime when the Big Bang hadn’t happened yet, really, but oh well. Witches traveled by Egger only in times of great need, mostly because it was a clumping awful way to travel; the vibrations could shake your bones to smithereens, you couldn’t breathe, and it was cold. To say nothing of the things that could use your Egger portals to get to places they really shouldn’t be. But every witch except the tiniest babies had been sent somewhere by Egger at least once, and if you were old enough to go Roundabout you knew how to send other people by Egger too.

Given what Tony had said about teleporters and what happened to them, though, the Leewit was not keen on anyone on Yarthe knowing that. Ninety-eight times out of a hundred, there were better ways to get away from something than the Egger route. But if one of those other two times came up, she didn’t want anyone stopping her. (Except for Big Bossy, about whom she could do nothing.) Her story thus far, and she’d better stick with it, was that she could be sent by Egger but couldn’t initiate it herself. Which meant she couldn’t send Wong anywhere by Egger to say, “See, _that’s_ the Egger route. What do _you_ people call it?”

Besides, given how easy and comfortable the sling ring portals were in comparison, the Leewit doubted anyone at Kamar Taj would be at all impressed by Egger travel, and the Leewit would much rather that they be at least a little impressed. “Open-minded sea turtles.” For Patham’s sake, didn’t these people have any manners?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In other words, nothing much was going on and this mission had hit a dull patch. For every centisecond the Leewit spent introducing Tony and Rhodes and Peter to new science and the layout of the hyperspace routes and the rest of it, she spent kiloseconds wading through computer encryption from petty Yarthian crime syndicates. Supposedly both Hydra and AIM had, at the very least, samples of alien tech, and possibly connections to other (largely hostile) races, but the Leewit didn’t get to see any of that. Friday chose her sample texts for how much use they’d be in developing decryption algorithms, not for their interesting content. 

Once again, the Leewit found herself missing Goth. Goth, hidden away in no-shape, would have had access to many more interesting secrets than the Leewit could coax out of anyone, of course, but Goth, too, would have had a much better feel for which of the bits and pieces the Leewit did pick up were important. Except for the trouble a vatch could theoretically be in if they made Pausert mad enough, (and grabbing Goth would have been even worse for that than grabbing the Leewit) she might have thought Big Bossy had somehow made off with the wrong sister. **NO, I DID NOT. ONE WOULD THINK BEINGS STUCK IN LINEAR TIME WOULD HAVE MORE PATIENCE.**

Oh, brother. Just what she needed.

**BUT IF YOU TRULY NEED ENTERTAINMENT…** No, the Leewit was just fine being bored, really! She just wanted to make the best use of… **I’LL JUST MOVE YOU A KILOMETER OR SO. ENJOY**!

And the Leewit felt the gut-churning whoosh of Egger travel, almost too brief to register, and found herself in the middle of a really fancy-looking store. At least, she assumed it was normally a pretty fancy place. The amount of space between pieces of merchandise suggested that, as did all the decorative glass and the gold-colored edging on things. Also the polished, well-kept look of the people that were running around panicking. The Leewit assumed the roiling clouds of smoke were a relatively new addition, along with the gaping cracks in the walls and floor, and the hellish-looking creatures crawling out of them.

Old Yarthe has some serious monsters in it, the Leewit thought, looking at them. She was honestly surprised these particular beasties hadn’t made it into AYD mythology, like Dinosaurs and Elfunts. They were about half the size of a wild bollum, though with longer limbs and smaller torsos – climbers rather than stampeders. They had ridged beaks as long as the Leewit’s feet, and pincer-like claws. Their backs were covered in chitinous armor like a shellfish, and everything else with coarse hair like a mountain bollum’s. Their eyes glowed orange through the smoke that filled the cavernous room more thickly with every passing second. 

When in doubt, get high. The Leewit’s first response to a threat was, still and always, to climb. Luckily, this was a shop, and there were display units. The Leewit sprang for one of the clothing racks, suspended from handy, climbable poles bolted in the ceiling, shimmying halfway up before her brain really kicked in at all. Her brain then helpfully pointed out that staying low was generally a better idea if there was smoke, and also that the giant crab-monkeys didn’t seem to have any trouble climbing either – there was one dangling a good meter or two above the Leewit’s head, clinging to the crossbeam of a frame that supported a curtain draped behind a headless figure in expensive clothes,.

She clung to the pole, mind working frantically. Would the monsters respond to whistling? Should she jump back down? _Thinkthinkthink…_

As soon as she actually tried consulting her brain, it provided her with a few useful details. The smoke that filled the room had no scent and was thick enough that she should have been having trouble breathing, but she wasn’t. And as for the crab-monkey things…

Well, they were horrible looking. But it took only one older sister with a penchant for light-shifts and a willingness to exploit one’s childhood fear of polymite swarms before one taught oneself to rely on one’s klatha senses first, and then on one’s vision. According to the Leewit’s klatha senses, there were no hell-beasties there.

“Miss, look out!”

The Leewit jerked and slid a half-meter or so down her pole, her feet scrambling for purchase among the clothing hangers. The burly man in the gray suit who had shouted at her wound up and threw a – thing – some kind of baton, maybe? Threw it through the smoke at the crab-monkey that had leapt from its perch. 

It didn’t work as intended. The baton sailed through the creature’s head, not affecting the monster in the least, and bounced off the ceiling, denting a panel and spinning on its way back down. There was a sound, barely audible over the yells of fleeing people and the hissing screeches of the crab-monkeys, of something going clunk, and a staticky pop. The monster at the top of the display frame vanished, and a dot of something plunged downward, too fast to see, and landed on the floor tiles with a clatter. The Leewit, quicker on the uptake and physically more agile than the man in the suit who had thrown the baton, tumbled herself from the clothing rack and dashed for whatever it was that had landed on the floor. The burly man rushed past her. Perhaps he wanted his baton back?

The thing that had fallen sat a half meter or so from a podium that held a headless mannequin and the pipe frame behind it. The Leewit scooped it up and crouched next to the podium, ready to scramble up the pipes again at need, and turned the thing over in her hands. It looked a little like the scout drones they sent out to check for hull damage sometimes, adapted for in-atmosphere conditions with little propellers on the side of it. It weighed maybe half a kilo and seemed to be mostly a directional relay and… that was almost certainly a holo-projector, there on the bottom.

“Hey, watch it with that thing!” The guard – and yes, he was definitely a guard; he had a little black comm box in his hand now that was making official sorts of noises – had recovered his baton and made his way back to the Leewit. He made an aborted snatch at the little drone. “Sometimes they’re rigged to blow! Please, miss, just set it down and head for the exit there.”

Frazzled, the Leewit set the drone down – carefully – and started moving in the direction the guard indicated, her brain still fizzing. Had Big Bossy had any purpose in sending her to this particular piece of excitement other than tweaking her nose a bit?

The guard had already forgotten her. He was yelling into his black box. “Confirmed the monsters are fake. Repeat, monsters are fake. There are drones near the ceiling.” And then something about someone called “Miss Terry,” and keeping an eye on the safes and the jewelry displays.

The Leewit had made her way around a freestanding unit that enshrined a pink leather handbag in a transparent box and was within sight of a door (the people streaming out of it were a big fat clue), when the buzzing feeling she’d been ignoring by her thigh resolved itself into Friday’s voice, cutting loud through the yelling and the occasional crash: “Leewit!! Pick up your foan!”

Still drifting toward the exit, bumping shoulders with busy guards and panicked customers, the Leewit did, fumbling the handpad out of a pocket. “I’m all right,” she said into the pickup, and patted her other pocket to see if she could find the “blootooth” that let her talk hands-free… no, she’d left it on her bedside table next to the charger, blast it. She hadn’t thought she’d need it today.

“Tinkerbell!” Tony’s voice on the foan was gratifyingly relieved. “What the hell are you doing in the middle of this mess at Bergdorf’s? I don’t pay you enough to be able to shop there, kid.”

“Vatch,” the Leewit snapped out. “This wasn’t my idea.”

“Sounds like an excuse, kid.”

“I swear it’s not,” the Leewit protested.

“Riiiiight.” It was impossible to tell through the foan how much of Tony’s skepticism was genuine, and how much was teasing. “Well then, I guess you’ll have no objection to keeping your head down and evacuating with everyone else.”

“Sounds good,” the Leewit agreed. “I think the fuss is starting to die down anyway. The monsters are fake and they’re looking for a woman called Miss Terry.”

“Terry,” Tony repeated blankly. “Ohh… kay…, well, good for them. Now, you absolutely cannot afford to have your name show up on any official records for this. We don’t want SHIELD getting interested again. So avoid being questioned if you can, and if you can’t, you didn’t see anything. The monsters showed up and you got out. Right? Right.”

“Sure,” the Leewit replied, her mind already elsewhere. The stinkin’ vatch had dropped her just about as far from any of the exits as it was possible to get, even if you managed to stop yourself from instinctively ducking holographic crab-monkeys or holes in the floor. Keeping her head down and getting out was going to take more work than it had at the park. And why, for Patham’s sake? What had the vatch been thinking?

“Oh!” Tony’s voice chirped from the foan, “Oh, she means Miss Terry _Oh!‘_ Miss Terry,’ oh, shit, that is priceless. Hey, Spidey, what do you…” the voice faded away again. Tony had either forgotten the Leewit was on the line or Friday was keeping it open in case something else came along.

__

The Leewit had been missing Goth again. That had been the last thing before Bossy showed up. Missing most of the _Venture’s_ crew, really, but mostly Goth. And the vatch had picked her up and dumped her in the middle of an… event… involving a really flashy light shifter… No. This Miss Terry Oh couldn’t be Goth. Goth did not do flashy. She could, but she didn’t. Besides, Miss Oh used holograms, and the klatha waves sloshing around had no feel of deliberate channeling to them, let alone familiarity. Of course, Goth and Pausert had been playing with ways to use his tech and her klatha together lately… no. Maybe Miss Oh was an ancestor or something though?

__

There was a burst of light and a rumble of drums from the other side of the shelving unit the Leewit was working her way around, that, once again, put the Leewit in mind of the showboat. A deep, sonorous voice boomed from all corners of the room. “Fear not!” it declaimed, while the Leewit peeked carefully around a mannequin that guarded the narrow end of the shelving unit, “I, the great Mysterio, will defend our fair city from this plague of …” 

__

The voice kept going on after that, but the Leewit stopped listening. She’d gotten an eyeful of the figure standing on the podium in the middle of the lobby, in front of some kind of art piece or advertisement or something. It didn’t dispel her circus memories at all. Those colors, and the cape, and… what was that on its head? Some kind of bubble? And... why was someone who projected such a deep, sonorous voice and wore clothes that emphasized their broad shoulders insisting on being called Miss? Emjay’s so-called “introductory gender studies rant” had not covered this level of complication. And did Miss Oh really think the holo-critters were real? Or did she think everyone else still thought so? And what was up with the weird klatha signature on the middle mannequin in the group of them over there? The mannequin grouping really wasn’t that far out of the Leewit’s way. She could still make her way to the door and evacuate with everyone else and also investigate.

__

That was to say, nobody made any attempt to stop the Leewit from pinching the middle mannequin’s tiny bottom as she headed briskly for the door.

__

The speakers in all the different corners of the room magnified the resulting squawk into something that sounded more convincingly hellish than the prerecorded noises of the holographic crab monkeys.

__

And apparently the mannequin illusion was tied to the place rather than the person, because an angry gloved hand thrust out suddenly from the dummy’s back and tried to reach for the Leewit. The speakers boomed: “You little-”

__

The Leewit skipped backward and made her eyes very wide. “Goodness, is that you, Miss Oh? I’m ever so sorry! I’ll just get out of your way and let you get on with saving us from the crab monkey holograms, then.”

__

“Holo-” the intercom boomed, and then cut off with a squeal, “Grams?” Miss Oh’s voice, unaugmented, was much higher and reedier.

__

“Yup,” the Leewit agreed cheerfully, and directed one careful whistle at the ceiling above the illusory mannequins, shattering the lens of the projector. The central mannequin vanished, revealing a man (or a “tranz” person, the Leewit reminded herself) dressed much like the caped projection still gesticulating in the middle of the lobby, but hunched over a sort of trolly: three or four shelves full of some kind of electronic equipment, set on rollers. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?” The Leewit concluded, and she took a flying leap at the trolley.

__

Miss Oh, who had been trying to grab the Leewit, windmilled his or her arms for balance and then made a swoop, trying to grab the trolley before it crashed to the ground. The resulting contortions left them badly off balance and unable to react when the trolley finished toppling off the platform and clocked its owner on the behelmeted chin as it fell. The mirrored fishbowl helmet made a surprisingly dull clunking sound, quickly drowned out by the tooth-cracking shriek of microphone feedback. 

__

The Leewit, meanwhile, tumbled off the falling trolley (seriously, there was just something about old Yarthe that encouraged somersaults), and bowled some few meters along the floor before bumping into someone’s legs. Whoever it was yelled. The Leewit stayed curled up, feeling shins and knees clonking her back and then a soft weight with unexpected corners plopping on top of her. The rustle of paper and swearing voice over her head indicated the softness had been whatever person she’d just tripped and the corners had been whatever they’d been carrying. Her foan squawked indignantly from her pocket. ...k is going on, Leewit. Leewit, Leewit, come in Leewit. That does not sound like keeping a low profile, kid; tell me I’m not going to have to bail you out – if I have to bail you out you are going to be in so much trouble...

__

“Sorry,” the Leewit croaked, more to whoever she’d just banged into than to Tony (or whoever it was that was yelling over the foan), “Are you all right?”

__

The chaos got worse after that. Security people boiled out of the corners and surrounded Miss Oh, the Leewit, the pudgy woman with the fluffy silver hair that had fallen on top of the Leewit, and the pudgy woman’s daughter, who was still yelling. The feedback squeal cut out, as did more than half the crab-monkey holograms. Many of the remaining ones appeared to freeze in place. One that had been making a swipe with one arm did it over and over, as if the crab-monkey were directing traffic.

__

The first crisis obviously being over and done with, the shoppers who hadn’t made it out of the building seemed to be inclined to stick around and gawk. The intercom came to life again, this time with the voice of a preternaturally calm woman (she sounded a bit like Toll, really) asking people to please move toward the exits and to cooperate with police and security personnel. A firm hand tapped the Leewit’s elbow, and a male voice said, “Can you get up, miss?”

__

The Leewit gave herself two more ticks to collect herself before unfolding. The guard took hold of her elbow and bicep and helped steady her as she climbed to her feet, shaking her head dizzily and breathing a little faster and harder than she really needed to. The guard did not let go of her elbow. “Can you tell me what happened, miss?”

__

The Leewit took another gasping breath and shook her head a little, eyes wide and staring. (If she went without blinking long enough it would be easier to tear up.) “I don’t-” she heaved, careful to pronounce the words the way Doctor Mistral from Chem did, rather than the way most people did around here, “I… I was leaving, and something tried to grab me, and, and there was this _noise,_ and I jumped to get away, and I crashed into the – that thing there…” she waved jerkily at the mess of equipment. “It was all so –” She blinked hard, squeezing out the first couple of tears, and took another heaving breath. “I don’t know…”

__

“Easy, miss, just take deep breath for me. What’s your name?” The guard was steering her discreetly toward a door other than the one people were streaming out of. The Leewit resigned herself to a period of interrogation. At least it wasn’t likely that anyone would tie her up this time. 

__

“Lee-Leewit,” she stammered, for once omitting her precious “the.” The Leewit that was going to answer the guard’s questions wasn’t The Leewit, she was a character the Leewit was playing. Just like Dame Ethelassia the Artiste with the Incredible Bosom wasn’t quite the same as Himbo Petey’s wife Ethy, even if they were the same person. Besides, the Yarthian ID and “green” card (which was mostly blue) she carried in her pocket had her as “Leewit DeCarres,” for political reasons she didn’t fully grasp. No one had explained why it listed her country of origin as “Cyprus,” either. The Leewit supposed there must have been some Yarthian equivalent of a Daalman involved somewhere, if not a Sedmon, who either knew someone in Cyprus who could alter the records or had just picked a place that wouldn’t raise too many questions among people like the guard.

__

The Leewit that the guard was interviewing, with her hysteria and faint accent, had come to Bergdorf’s “just to look,” and had, coincidentally, been one of the first to learn that the monsters were illusory, “but was so escary, even when I know that!” And she had been making her way out to the door when, again coincidentally, she got close enough to the hologram that had been hiding Miss Oh to interrupt. After which many things had happened at once and she was so confuse!

__

The guard did not completely buy it. There were foan calls and computer messages, verifying her bureaucratic status, and more calls to Stark Industries, verifying her employment there (Friday did an excellent job faking a harried supervisor whose irritating genius charge had disappeared on her lunch break and was two hours late.) Then the guards were joined by others, in cheaper suits, who identified themselves as being detectives with the City police rather than “Loss prevention,” and the questions started coming faster and faster. They’d found a witness or a recording or something of the Leewit teasing Mysterio, without much indication of fear nor any noticeable accent. Probably a witness, since they didn’t try and play the recording at her. The Leewit shook her head, teary eyed – “Miss Oh is hero, yes? I was glad she save us from the holographic crab monkeys! I didn’t know anything was there but… mannequin? Is that the word? Until I bump into it. And then there was this … sound…” She was not about to get any more specific about that first whistle until she was back safe in Stark tower. At least.

__

She wondered if the rapid-fire pace of the questions was meant to try and tease her out of her ‘fake’ accent. Too bad it wasn’t fake. Not that kind of fake, anyway. Klatha language skills could imitate the precise tones of Doctor Mistralish just as easily as the very similar dialect of Nuyorkian, without the Leewit’s thinking about it much at all. The Leewit could do accents better than the Do Eldel, who wasn’t exactly a slouch in that department.

__

Another detective came in and told her Mysterio – “That’s one word, Miss De Carres, not three, and he’s a he, not a she,” was accusing her of working with the unknown villain who had been behind the holograms. The Leewit, according to Mysterio, had thrown herself at the delicate equipment he’d been using to try and gain control of the drones.

__

“Leewit DeCarres” drew up indignantly and then wrinkled her brow in sudden thought and let her mouth hang open a little, making her apparent confusion as pretty as she could. “But the equipment went—” She gestured an explosion, with sound effects, “and then the monsters stop. Or am I not remembering it right? If he didn’t have control of…”

__

“Yeah,” the detective smirked a little. “It’s lookin’ an awful lot like the latest hero on the block might also be his own arch-nemesis.”

__

The Leewit clasped both hands over her mouth in a shocked-sounding giggle. “Oh, no! And his-a cape was so pretty!”

__

The Leewit’s foan buzzed. It had been silent all this time; she didn’t know if they’d actually disconnected or just very sensibly kept eavesdropping without interrupting, but she looked at the detectives for permission and then picked it up. “Yes,” she said into the speaker, “I am estill with police…” 

__

The voice on the other end was Tony’s, ranting. “The Hell, Tinkerbell! I told you to keep your head down… you can’t just go popping off like that. You want me to take away your ID cards and give you back to SHIELD? I don’t want to do that but if you can’t…”

__

“Is fine!” The Leewit shouted into the foan, “is nobody arresting me or nothing!” She looked back at the detectives. “Not arresting me, right? Oh, good.” She let Tony get a few more words in and then added, in an indignant tone, “was my lunch break! I didn’t mean to get estuck with crab monkey holograms and police! I didn’t mean to bump into hologram machine – it looked like a – a- clothes doll- what do you – mannequin, right.”

__

“Kid, this is serious. You fucking whistled. In front of witnesses. No matter how you play it, someone’s going to have noticed. To say nothing of the fucking teleportation. Do you know how much of FRIDAY’s CPU space is occupied with hacking into the security cameras at Bergdorf’s and adding you to the footage so it looks like you came in the front door? I should dock your pay.”

__

The Leewit sniffled loudly. “That is so meeeean,” she wailed, peering sideways at the detectives from under her eyelashes, “You are used to superhero things in New York. I was e-scared! Please! I will work extra time Saturday to make up for lunch break!”

__

“Oh. Oh, you are not using me for one of your scenes, kid.”

__

“I could put you on speaker?” The Leewit suggested/threatened. “You could talk to detectives yourself?”

__

She could just about hear Tony pinching the bridge of his nose. “Just… get out of there, kid. I’ve got Happy outside waiting to pick you up.” The foan went silent again.

__

The Leewit blinked wetly at her interrogators. “Please, can I go now?” quavered, “You have my e-foan number if you need more later.”

__

One of the store detectives looked up from his own foan. “We’ve got Gunilla flippin’ Goldberg waiting to be interviewed still. She’s threatening to sue.”

__

The lead detective groaned. “OK, OK. You’re free to go, Miss DeCarres. Here’s my card. Call me if you remember anything more, OK?”

__

“Thank you!” The Leewit hugged the startled detective and hurried out the office door.

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thanks to the classic YA novel _The First Wives Club_ for the loan of Gunilla Flippin' Goldberg.
> 
> Friends, let us have a brief moment of silence for the beautiful plotbunny that took off from this chapter and didn't make it into the fic: The Leewit was going to come to the attention of General Ross’s people and get snatched off to a Seekrit Science bunker. 
> 
> She was going to meet Deadpool there and they were going to wreak havoc, and furthermore, Deadpool was going to be revealed as a natural vatch handler, with White and Yellow being baby vatches that adopted him. There were going to be jokes about invisible black things vs. invisible yellow things. Deadpool’s teleporter disc was going to be explained as a vatch thing. 
> 
> Alas, none of that is in this fic, because a) the tone got too bloody for a Karres fic, b) If I included it, I’d have to find other things for Deadpool to do after that, which, no, and c) Deadpool swore on Bea Arthur’s shoulder pads that if the boxes turned out to be anything other than hallucinations it would really, irrevocably, mess him up too much for him to function and if I inflicted that on him he would crawl through the fourth wall and unalive me. So none of that happened in this story. Oh, well.


	14. Sending the Leewit to Her Room is Not a Great Idea

Just as she had done in the aftermath of the Central Park Blob Monsters, Mrs. Long greeted the Leewit with a long, smothering hug that was as comforting as it was embarrassing. “Oh sweetie,” she said, again, “I’m so very glad you’re alright!” And just as before, she promised there would be the Leewit’s favorite seizure salad and garlic bread in the cafeteria at dinner. Mrs. Long proved to be just about the only similarity, though. Tony waited just inside her quarters in the tower in order to announce that he was confining her to them, and then deliver a blistering lecture that lasted nearly a full kilosecond about how poor her choices had been. The Leewit got the feeling he didn’t believe in vatches and thought she’d teleported herself into the middle of the fight with the holographic crab-monkeys for the fun of the thing. 

He didn’t actually say so, though. What he said was, “Let me remind you what SHIELD does to teleporters, kid. They get the idea they can’t trust you, they will fit you with tracking chips and a goddamn shock collar that goes off any time you get too far from the receiver. We kept you away from them last time by the skin of our teeth. So if you can’t control it, you keep. Your head. Down. You end up somewhere weird? You don’t attract attention when you get there. You don’t goose the mannequins. You don’t tease the caped blowhards. You don’t fucking _whistle._ You keep your head down and get out. You got that?”

The Leewit nodded, mute, without actually agreeing very much. While she couldn’t really pinpoint any flaw in the man’s logic (and it wasn’t like Pausert hadn’t gotten shouty sometimes after he got scared), she nonetheless cherished a decided impression that Tony was overstepping somehow. Pausert had stopped trying to keep the Leewit from collecting alien swearwords after she started routinely brushing her teeth with soap. And she had the exact same feeling about Tony now. He might not be wrong, exactly, but he could just go stick his ovipositor in a zap mite mound. So there.

It wasn’t like being restricted to quarters was that big a punishment anyway. Not when her quarters were the size of the _Venture’s_ bridge, where she’d spent whole megaseconds on end sometimes. Not when she still had Friday and the internet; even with access restricted to areas Tony deemed work-relevant (including political articles about the developing field of ‘Enhanced law.’) She could study until her head ached. Furthermore, there were plumbing schematics to peruse, against the day when she could go back home and make her fortune re-introducing the shower-bath to everyone. There were furnishings to take apart, reconfigure, and hang upside-down from.

Plus, there was always klatha practice. Not that practice was quite the right word. You couldn't practice klatha the way you could practice, say, tumbling routines or nova gun repair. You either had a pattern, or you didn’t. If you had it, there wasn’t any need to do it over and over again and burn up energy. If you didn’t, you didn’t muck about with it, because it could get you killed. And some patterns could be taught, but others… turned up, at need and as you were able to handle them. Having a teacher-pattern in your head the way Karres children did helped accelerate a natural process. But even so, there was… klatha learning that was kind of like practice: a sort of stretching, a kind of exploration of your own capabilities. Getting an understanding of yourself as you existed in egger space and other realms that couldn’t be wholly sensed, only relled. You had to be careful, normally, so as not to attract the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of vatch. But vatches were… social, kind of, and if Big Bossy was wreaking havoc in the Leewit’s personal life, it at least wasn’t likely to allow any other vatches to do so. So… while she and Tony engaged in competitive sulking (and there was _no_ way she wasn’t going to win that one against an _only child_ ), there were some klatha things she could do.

The whistles, for instance. They were, by Karres standards, baby stuff. Instinctive, improvised, simple. But simple could be built on.

Stark Tower was, by and large, shatterproof. Even the windows were made of some kind of polymer, more flexible than glass. She wasn’t even sure about the tiles in the wet room. She could probably learn the exact kind of whistle that would break each of these different kinds of thing, if she could keep it up long enough, but that couldn’t be all her whistles were good for… The spigots and control mechanisms in the wet room were mostly made of metal and ceramic, but that was cosmetic. The pipes under the drain and behind the faucets were some kind of composite that had _interesting_ reverb properties: not as echo-y as metal, not as screechy as wood… kind of a buzzing. Different pitches of whistle produced different degrees of buzzing. In fact, as the Leewit whistled and listened and whistled again, she thought she could actually hear the points where the sound zipped past the slightly gooey elbow joint under the too-high washbasin and joined the larger outflow pipe. If she did a quick sequence of notes and bounced them just right, she could catch some of the other connections after that. Like… like subradio pings. It wasn’t exactly the stealthiest thing ever, not compared to what Goth could do, but… she could use her whistles for recon. _Fascinating!_

Friday chimed. “Your Wisdom, the boss says t’ tell you, whatever you’re doing that’s making Mr. Kirby think there’s a poltergeist in the gray-water reclamation plant, please stop.”

Alright. Really, really, not stealthy then. Good to know.

It might have been a coincidence that her access clearance returned to normal the next morning, but she doubted it.

^^^^^^^^^^

James Rhodes wished he could say he was surprised when, two days into man-child Tony Stark’s attempt to discipline the witch-child Leewit, the tower filled with … sounds, as of a giant pigeon trying to teach itself how to play the didgeridoo. They were loudest in the bathrooms. Exposure exceeding a few minutes had… complicated effects, ranging from headaches to the spontaneous appearance of freckles in runic patterns.

Tony had to spend the rest of the day with Legal, putting out fires with the non-SI tenants on the lower floors, to say nothing of the Accords Oversight Committee and the other babysitters. Pepper absented herself to visit her family in Charleston, which she did only when she was really pissed off. Rhodes met up with Tony in the penthouse when Legal finally let him go around nine-thirty, mostly to make sure he didn’t start drinking again and make things worse. 

“Tell me I’m not turning into my dad.” Tony spoke to the window that looked out toward the river, his voice quiet and harsh.

Rhodey creaked himself into a leather-covered armchair and took a sip of O’Douls. His younger self would have waxed long and scatological at the idea of being in the same room as a non-alcoholic beer. his older self knew that sometimes, you just needed a clean bitterness on your tongue without any attendant head-fuckery. “Because you’re locked in a pissing match with a teenage smartass?” he asked his friend. 

Tony didn’t move. Voluntarily mentioning Howard in any context at all was a pretty bad sign to start with, and it was always tricky, trying to deal with the monster Tony saw in his head compared to the… well, the humanized version of Howard was still a real sonuvabitch, but still. “You think he’d put up with the Leewit a second longer than it took to turn her in to ATCU?” Rhodey prodded, because, for better or for worse, Howard had compartmentalized a hell of a lot better than his son.

“Maybe I should still do that," Tony sighed. "Pull a couple of strings… Ross doesn’t get wood over her kind of thing like he does over physical enhancements; she might not be that badly off. And I literally cannot think of a single thing I could do that would not make this worse somehow.”

That was… unusually accurate, for a Tony guilt-wallowing session. And unusual for him to recognize his own limits this early in. Poor bastard was likely imagining that one fight with the Leewit had Ruined Everything, which, there was no way, but still.

“So don’t do anything. Let me handle her instead.”

Tony actually turned around at this.

Rhodey smiled. “One thing military command will teach you, it’s how to deal with cocky little shits who think they’re all that.”

Tony fluttered his eyelashes. “Awww, Pookiebear! I’m flattered!”

“You were neither the first nor the only, Tones.”

“But I’m your favorite.”

“You have been, at various times, the cockiest, the littlest, and/or the shittiest cocky little shit I ever met.”

“There, see? I knew you cared.”

^^^^^^^^^^^

It wasn’t just the Leewit’s protection that Rhodey was thinking about, though. Tony, he knew, thought the kid was getting herself into trouble through being too comfortable and naive, out of her depth in an alien time and place. Her few lies were blatant and transparent. She triggered none of his hypersensitive antennae for smooth, weasely liars, so Tony thought she was on the up and up. But even with the recent example of Rogers behind of him, Tones forgot that hidden depths could be masked by clarity just as well as by complexity. The last time that one had fooled Rhodey was when he’d been on an assignment in Juneau and attempted to go wading in Gold Creek. He was going to make sure the Leewit knew he was still watching. And he was going to see if he could get a better handle on the inside of her head while he was at it. The trick with the smart ones, Rhodey thought, was to let them know you knew they were smart. If they were defensive, it tended to calm them down, and if, like the Leewit, they tended to play dumb, it disconcerted them. 

So the next day, when the Leewit was due to join himself and Peter in Lab 12 to discuss neural interfaces, Rhodey positioned himself near the Leewit’s usual desk and locked his legs into something like parade rest, prepared to loom for as long as it took. He did not uncross his arms to accept the hug the Leewit tried to give him when she bounced into the room. The refusal earned him a dose of puppydog eyes. He’d swear the kid’s _hair_ grew fluffier.

“Um?” she squeaked.

“Tony’s done the freakout part,” Rhodes noted, calmly, “and the damage and the damage control are both about as done as they’re gonna get. So. Now things are a little calmer, how ‘bout you tell me what you were thinking, back there with Mysterio.”

The kid had an expressive little face, when she wasn’t deliberately controlling it. Her nostrils flared briefly in irritation, and she tossed her head. “Mostly,” she sniffed, “I was thinking what I wished I could do to that stinkin’ vatch. Or that Pausert was here, so _he_ could do it.” 

Whatever she said after that came out as a barely audible and resentful sounding mutter, of which Rhodes only caught two syllables: _gah-thee._ He kept his own expression neutral. “And what else?” he prompted.

Sigh. Eyeroll. After which the Leewit put her face in the mirror of Rhode’s own blank mask, which expression never, ever stayed on her face unless she was actively thinking about it. “Vatches almost never do things for just one reason at a time. And my mother and sister both do things with ligh- with illusions. I’m used to…” The neutral mask disappeared into something like confusion. 

“Used to having that kind of thing be on _your_ side?” Rhodes suggested, and got a glare. “Sounds to me,” he went on, “like you were maybe thinking a little bit but mostly feeling things. Which is not unusual when a bad situation comes out of nowhere, and that is why those of us who get into bad situations on a professional basis train our automatic reactions so hard. But your trained instincts, and I know you have them, kid, are for a time and a place that are very, very different from here and now. Now, Tony may or may not have made the right call when he told you to keep your head down. We can’t know that until it’s too late to matter. But you do need to keep your head, full stop. You don’t get to stop thinking until you’ve got a hell of a lot more training under your belt. Got that?”

He watched her for reactions, more for when than for what. At this stage of the game, he didn’t need her to like him, or to be happy, and she’d probably already learned as much as she was going to from her last little adventure. But for as long as the Leewit stuck around, he was going to need to know which buttons to push. So when she gave him one jerky nod and reached around him to pull her desk chair out, he let her go and settled into his own workstation, reviewing the latest pile of spreadsheets from a few long-term projects and letting his back-brain mull a bit.

That mention of the sister had been… interesting. The Leewit tended to be a little cagey about her family arrangements, spouting innocuous details with very few hard facts. It had to be habit, as much as anything, since knowing how one family worked God knew how far in the future wasn’t likely to help or hinder anything. Still, Rhodes had an outline. The Leewit was the youngest of three sisters and apparently the designated wild child. She mentioned her middle sister, Goth, the most often; he had the feeling that the two of them were pretty tight. Or… was it _had been_ pretty tight? The most vivid Goth stories always seemed to have a qualifier in them like, “when we were with the circus,” or “just after that thing with the Mother Plant when I was seven.” When the Leewit talked about the rest of the ragtag team aboard the _Venture,_ she tended to slip into the present tense: “Vezzarn’s too creaky to hide in ventilation shafts these days.” That happened a lot less often with mentions of Goth.

Had something… happened to Goth? What had the alleged Vatch pulled the Leewit away from, and how worried was she?

Or it could just be adolescence and family dynamics. Whatever it was, the Leewit clearly had a Goth button the way Tony had a Howard button, hardwired into her control systems.

It wasn’t her only button, though. Peter, bless his little footie pajamas, came skidding into the lab right about then, talking mile a minute about all the tests he’d developed to try and turn the Evil Pipes Incident into something useful. The Leewit greeted him with her usual bubbly enthusiasm (at least half the bubbles were a front, Rhodes was almost sure,) and it didn’t take more than ten minutes for them to restart their usual squabble.

“No, Leewit, we change _one_ variable at a time. The size of the pipe, _or_ the material, not both. That’s how the scientific method works.”

“Great Patham, you are so clumping _slow!”_ Because the Leewit still thought the scientific method was For Other People, apparently.

Rhodes chuckled to himself under his breath and went back to his spreadsheets. He had a good three hours to get some work done before his next PT session, so he had two and a half before it was time to push another of the Leewit’s buttons.

^^^^^^^^^

By the time the reminder popped up on his desktop, (“Talk to the Kid about the Thing,”) the whistling tests had been shelved for the day, as the Leewit pled exhaustion.

“My tongue may never be the same again, Peter” she insisted with remarkable clarity for someone making such a claim. “I hardly ever do this for more than a few minutes at a time.”

“You use your tongue when you whistle? How?

_“Errrrgh!”_

Now they’d gone back to their more usual lab works. The Leewit typed rapidly, communing with Friday in some unholy computer language that didn’t quite qualify as code. Peter was dealing with holograms and simulators today, tinkering with his web formula to accommodate temperature fluctuations. Rhodes signed off on his last four status reports and pushed himself upright, braces creaking slightly. “Gotta go, kids.” 

“ ‘Kay...” Peter did not look up from his imaginary molecule.

The Leewit batted her eyes. “Gimme a hug goodbye?” She held out her hands a little in invitation and gave him the puppy face. 

Rhodes took a breath and tilted his head to one side. “Y’know, Leewit, I’ve been wanting to say something about that.”

The Leewit pouted carefully. “I mean,” she said, “you don’t have to. I know not everyone likes hugs. But...”

Rhodes sighed. “Look, missy. I’m not stupid, OK? A lot of people, they see me and Tony in the same room, they think the fast-talking white guy must be the smart one. But just ‘cause I don’t talk as much as he does doesn’t mean I don’t notice things. You think idiots make Colonel?”

“I don’t think that,” the Leewit said, snorting, “Tony’s a dope.”

“He can be, yes,” Rhodes said, “but that is not the point. The point is, I am a trained observer and scientist. I can do pattern recognition. For instance, if, four times out of five, when this one girl hugs me, my back starts twinging, that is a pattern. And if those incidents correlate to sudden leaps forward in my PT sessions… tell me, Leewit, are there such things as klatha healers?”

Peter looked up at that. The Leewit swallowed hard and went still the way she did when she was trying not to squirm. “Sure,” she said, and her voice only shook a little. “My big sister Maleen’s a healer. It’s… what was the term you guys were using the other day? For things that… oh. It’s kind of a high-test power. Takes it out of you. To do anything really big, a healer has to borrow power from other witches so they don’t burn themselves out.”

“That so?” Rhodes asked, his face neutral.

“Yup,” the Leewit nodded vigorously. “Karres healers work in teams – most of them have a partner or two who’s got a lot of power but low-test talents. Like, Pausert’s a hot witch, but vatch handling’s his main thing and half of the time that’s just talking to them, plus he can pull more power from the vatches if he’s lucky. So he can lend power to...” Rhodes’ eyebrow was going up. The Leewit stopped.

“I thought,” Rhodes said mildly, “that Pausert didn’t work with your biggest sister all that much.”

The Leewit studied her fingernails. “Well, no,” she said, “but if she needed it he _could...”_

“You told us once that specific talents run in families?”

The Leewit’s mouth snapped shut. Rhodes took three slow, stone-footed steps toward her, looming.

“I really do not like it when I find out someone’s been withholding important data, Leewit.”

Peter made a squeaking noise. “Um,” he said. “I bet… I bet a lot of bad guys would be pretty eager to get ahold of someone with healing powers, if they knew it was a thing.”

The Leewit shot him a grateful look. “They sure do,” she told him. “And most of ‘em don’t care too much about burnout, either. Healers tend to be pretty… private about that kind of thing, ‘specially if they’re going Roundabout.”

Rhodes flicked his eyes in Peter’s direction and then rolled them. “Guys,” he said, “if you had ever roomed with a teenage Tony Stark, you would know better than to even think of trying the puppy face.”

Peter flapped his hands. “I was just… I mean, theoretically…”

“ _Theoretically,_ anyone who can affect your body enough to heal it can also really fuck you up, Peter. You do realize that, right?”

“You’d think so,” the Leewit said, thoughtfully, “but it’s actually a lot harder. With klatha, anyway. Maleen can heal someone who’s taken a direct hit from a needle grenade if she’s got someone feeding her power, but about the worst she could do the other way was give people stomachaches. It’s ‘cause there’s klatha in living bodies and it takes more power to go against the grain, or that’s what she says. I’ve never needed to try – always easier to just whistle at ‘em or sock them in the nose.”

“Sounded like a confession to me, Leewit.” 

Her eyes bugged a little comically. “Oh, _beelzit!_ This is why I always let the Captain do the talking.”

Despite himself, Rhodey snorted a laugh at that. He tried to relax his posture and gentle his voice a little. “So… if healing is high-risk and high energy, why do it somewhere like this at all? You need the practice?”

The Leewit twiddled her fingers. “Well...”

“Is it, like, a compulsion?” Peter’s expression was a very familiar mix of concern and scientific inquiry. “Like, do you feel weird if you don’t do the stuff you can do?”

The Leewit snorted. “No! What a weird idea. No, I just figured I owe you guys.”

Rhodey blinked. “What, now?”

The Leewit’s cheeks had gone pink. “Well,” she said, “I mean. Tony hired me to do the computer stuff and things, and that’s all fine, but you don’t even like me all that much and you still went along with it. So I figured I should do something.”

Rhodes contemplated that statement for a while. So… she had a better notion of just how delicate a dance was going on behind the scenes than she pretended. But her motives… Jesus, she was as twisty as Romonof in her own weird way… “Just tell me you won’t try your sneak-healing stuff on Tones. I cannot begin to tell you what a bad idea that would be.”

The Leewit’s mouth dropped open. She blinked her eyes very rapidly and then shook her head hard. “Honestly,” she said, “I’m really clumping glad he just wants me to do computer things. You’ve got one clean injury and lots of nerve damage. Simple. Tony… Tony is a _mess!”_

He couldn’t help himself. That single syllable just described… so much. Rhodey thumped back down into his chair and slumped over his own knees laughing. 

When he looked up again, the Leewit was smirking. She knew she had his number, the cocky little shit. But that worried him a little less now than it had this morning. Rhodey hauled himself back upright again. “All right, girl. Gimme my damn hug.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gold Creek, in Juneau, AK, is deep enough to swim in, if you don’t mind the hypothermia. But the water is clear enough to make it all look about ankle-high when you look down from above. My father has many fond memories of persuading greenhorn friends to go wading in Gold Creek. So I made Rhodey one of them.


	15. The Leewit Meets a Cold Witch

Tony and Rhodes kept the Leewit well away from any big decisions or serious hero business, and she couldn’t really blame them. Not considering her own dilemmas with regards to the Sanctum, to say nothing of how bad it had spooked her when Rhodey called her out on the powers she’d been trying to keep secret. Besides, she thought, preening at her own maturity and toleration, these poor dopes had barely any decent premoters at all. It was hardly their fault if they got confused and clung to their clumping old rules, especially if they didn’t even quite trust each other. It did mean she had to be sneaky, though, if she wanted to get any sort of clues about the workings of Yarthe or any better notion of what she ought to do about being stuck there.

Luckily, she wasn’t the only one feeling left out. 

The Leewit still didn’t patrol the streets with Spider-Man, but once Ned got a glimpse of the kind of things she could do with computer code, he roped her into support operations. “Come to the Chair side,” he invited in a deep, overdramatic voice, and then went back to his usual tones. “We have cookies.” 

The Leewit decided she liked the Chair side. It wasn’t as much fun as, say, skateboarding, but there was a lot going on. Ned had a police scanner, jiggered up somehow to get around the radio encryption, and three 2D monitors with tabs full of news feeds and interesting mapping functions, some of which Ned had built and some of which were open to anyone.

“See, we’re doing three things at once,” Ned explained, as the Leewit hovered over his shoulder. “But they’re all pattern recognition which is your thing, right? So, we’re trying to pick up hints about where bad guys are doing bad stuff that Spider-Man can stop right away. This screen over here is looking at CompStat, which is what the police department is using to do more or less the same thing, and this is the current call screen. Now, at the same time, if we catch hints of, like, smuggling rings or secret evil underground labs or the bigger stuff, we need to track that too. Some of it we do stuff about, some of it we pass on. And then at the same time we need to track where Peter is and where all the cops are, so they don’t stop Peter before Peter stops the bad guys. This screen here is hooked into Karen, the AI in Peter’s suit. Got it?” 

The Leewit nodded.

“OK, let’s go. Newbie’s on popcorn duty.”

It only took a dozen centiseconds or so for the Leewit to figure out what Ned had left out. On a slow night like this one, the Guys in the Chair had to keep talking to Peter and keep him from getting bored. Or listen to him complain. “They shut up every time I come into the gym. It’s not like I’m going to tell anyone, OK? And I’m supposed to be training up for bigger stuff someday. Why can’t I at least know what’s going on? What kind of Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man can I be if aliens come and wipe out the neighborhood?”

He went on in this vein for some time while Ned clucked sympathetically and tried to steer him toward a nightclub that had ties to a prostitution ring. “And I’m pretty sure Tony records even the secret meetings.”

“MJ would be all over it if she got to listen in on secret UN meetings,” Ned observed idly. 

“Do you think Friday runs those recordings?” The Leewit asked, “Because Karen links to Friday right?”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And that was why, a few days later, while Tony and Vision attended a meeting in a place called the Yoo-Enn, Peter and the Leewit holed up in Peter’s bedroom in Kweenz, tinkering with a setup that involved the hood of Peter’s spider suit, a laptop, and both their foans, trying to eavesdrop. Ned was remoting in from somewhere else “so I have time to make a daring escape if we get caught.”

The bedroom was a stupid place for a meeting, the Leewit thought, but quite nice for a room. While still larger than a ship cabin, Peter’s room looked much more like a bedroom than the guest room at the compound had, with the loft bed and possessions distributed higgledy-piggledy on the other pieces of furniture, diagrams and posters stuck to the walls, boxes of junk in the corners. Peter had politely offered the Leewit the uncomfortable chair that spun on its little pedestal and perched himself on the loft bed, hanging over the edge of the mattress to eavesdrop the goings-on at the Yoo-Enn.

The Leewit did not find the goings-on impressive, but then, she didn’t know who most of these people were, and the voice connection kept cutting in and out as Ned argued with Friday. She let her gaze wander about the cluttered little room, trying to guess what things were for, and stretching her klatha senses as far as they could rell in case the vatch showed up again.

Peter, behind her on the bed, chewed on his lip, trying to get his head around the strategies for getting the cooperation of such dubious allies as Dr. Doom and the Brotherhood of Mutants on any potential alien invasions without giving away too much. 

“Well, first off I disagree with the assumption that any of these guys have much that we don’t, technology-wise.” Tony’s voice popped out, suddenly clear of interference. “SHIELD, AIM, Doom, and everyone else are working with the same limited pool of stolen alien tech, and we’ve already got the guy who was able to reverse-engineer the Tesseract energy into something usable without even having the original to study. That's me, by the way. In case you forgot.”

The Leewit twitched irritably and spun the chair around. “I’m on to you,” she announced.

Peter jerked, nearly falling off the bed. “Who, me?” he squeaked, “I wasn’t looking at your butt, I swear. I wouldn’t be able to even if I wanted to, what with the chair. Um, not that it’s not, um. I’ll stop now.”

“Him.” The Leewit glared at the corner of the room that contained a net laundry bag hanging off the closet door, a periodic table poster, and a stack of textbooks.

“Mr. Stark?” Peter flailed, and when the Leewit shook her head impatiently, “One of those vatch things?”

“Nope.” The Leewit stood, slowly, never taking her eyes from the corner. “You’re a pretty hot witch,” she told the periodic table, “one of the best I’ve seen here on Yarthe. It takes some real doing to hold no-shape for that long and tamp your klatha output at the same time. But my middle sister Goth? She’s the _Queen_ of sneaks. And I’ve been learning how to dodge her pranks since day one.”

Peter looked back and forth between the Leewit and the invisible target of her wrath, trying to catch a clue. He didn’t think the Leewit had suddenly gone crazy, but on the other hand, his spidey-sense wasn’t tingling at all….

“You might as well drop it,” the Leewit threatened. “Or I’ll whistle both your daggers and every last buckle on your armor into shrapnel.”

“Wh….” Peter said, intelligently, but he pulled himself upright and flattened himself against the ceiling, trying to make his way to an advantageous corner, as prepared as someone could get when he had no idea what was going on.

The voice that answered from the empty corner of the room confirmed the Leewit’s assertion that they were dealing with a “him,” at least. Resonant, but nasal, emerging from a height that indicated someone taller than Tony but shorter than Thor. “A paltry threat,” it declared, “seeing as I have no need of weaponry to dispose of such as you. Nonetheless...”

The shape emerged grin first, like the Cheshire Cat, resolving in a few seconds into a tall humanoid, dark of hair and clothing, pale of face, with a supercilious expression. By the time he appeared entirely solid, Peter realized why the intruder seemed familiar. He resolved to say something quippy and fearless. “Hooooly crap,” his mouth said while he was trying to think of something good, “You’re that guy. From the invasion. Lo-”

The last word was cut off as if someone had stuck a gag in his mouth.

“You will _not_ say my name,” the godling announced coldly. “You will not even think it. You will not attract the attention of-” he checked himself abruptly and took a breath. “I intend,” he said calmly, “to ally my powers with those of your mentor and his compatriots, temporarily, against an enemy we hold in common. But secrecy is of the utmost importance. If...” he stopped again and glared at Peter. “You will not speak,” he repeated.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The ping from Karen interrupted round Umpty-zillion of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Latveria, and Tony would probably have tried to claim it was an emergency even if it had just turned out that the kid’s rising heart rate was because he’d seen that MJ girl’s tits. But then Friday patched the audio through Tony’s earpiece, and he stood up right in the middle of the latest monologue, his face drained of blood. “Sorry to interrupt,” he croaked, skittering away from the table and activating his implants, “But I have to go right the fuck now. We’ve got a confirmed sighting of the Green God of Daddy Issues in Queens.”

The rest of the meeting made quacking noises about vetting and authority, while Vision, bless him, went all phase-y and zipped away. “I’m going,” Tony said. “Yes, I will keep you apprised, no, I will not damage property getting from here to there, will you fucking _please_ contact some backup for Viz and me? Is the Richards clan still on a three-hour tour of the Andromenda galaxy? Does Xavier have someone? This is the guy who led the Chitauri here, people. We do not want to see what happens if Spider Man gets there first and starts quipping at him.” Lies, Tony thought. He would give… a lot… to hear the kid making terrible jokes over the com right now. Anything to be sure he was OK after that cut-off, _You’re Lo-_ , and then the god’s ranting. To say nothing of Future Tinkerbell. Which was a terrible nickname; he had to come up with something better. Teen Witch? Alf-something? Sailor Sabrina? That one wasn’t too bad.

The babble of the committee on the comms was taking too much of his attention. Emergency services had sent out a CENS message to the neighborhood: “be prepared to evacuate.” Stephen Strange’s assistant had answered the phone but promised the sorcerer would be there ASAP. Whatever that meant when your house was half in another friggin’ dimension. Christ on a kebab, Tony thought, they were _so_ not ready for this all to go down now… There was a … sound. Tony flinched. The channel dedicated to the Baby Monitor essayed static. Shit.

But then Vision’s voice came through, clear as anything. The Leewit’s whistle hadn’t, this time, destroyed both ends of the comm link. (She could do that, though. They’d tested it.)

“I am at the location, sir,” Vision had a distinct advantage over Tony in this kind of terrain, since he could fly through buildings faster than Tony could fly over them. On the comms, his voice sounded as unruffled as ever. “There is no property damage thus far, and insofar as I can tell through the window, both children appear unharmed. I will delay making entry until you inform me you are at Mister Parker’s bedroom door, unless the situation changes.”

“Good man. Or, uh, designator of your choice. Thanks. What’s going on right now?”

Tony forced himself to do a slow landing in front of the building, rather than a damage-the-pavement one, and forced his brain away from the automatic subroutine of making up a lie that Aunt May would swallow about what was going on if she found out Iron Man had showed up at her apartment. 

“Her Wisdom whistled, sir.”

“Yeah, got that, right before the Baby Monitor went dead.”

“Most of the equipment in the room nonetheless appears unharmed, sir. I surmise the Leewit’s purpose was interruption of the sort of discourse you tend to refer to as ‘monologuing.’ She now appears to be berating the younger Odinson, and he appears to be listening. I would not venture to guess as to his likely responses.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The building super met him at the door, offering up his Master keyring, and Tony accepted gratefully. Queens did not need to learn that Tony already had a spare key to the place. “You are a king among supers,” Tony informed him, plucking the keys up and gently shoving the man toward the exterior building door, “a really super super. I promise I will give you a selfie afterward assuming we can keep the world from ending in the next couple of days.” He hovered his way up the fire stairs and down Peter’s hall.

As he unlocked the front door, he said, “Now, Viz.”

“I hear you, sir,” Vision advised, “but I recommend that we move slowly. Other than possibly placing a silencing spell on Master Parker, our target has not made any overtly hostile moves, and the Leewit may in fact be developing a rapport with him.”

“That is a fucking terrifying idea, Viz. I’m going in.” And Tony burst through the bedroom door.

The scene in front of him was much as Vision described it: the Leewit standing toe to toe (and head to collarbone, more or less) with the mad god, Peter hovering silently in the background, edging up along the wall toward the ceiling. When the door banged open, the two mages looked at him briefly and then went back to their… whatever it was. Peter held up one finger in a “wait” gesture.

“I told you,” the Leewit said, as if continuing a conversation, “that’s just the basic one. I wish Captain was here; he’s better at locks than me.”

“The captain,” Loki enunciated around his perma-sneer, “is a reckless hobbledehoy and a magical numbskull.”

“Different captain.” The Leewit and Peter spoke in tandem, so the god’s silencing spell must have worn off, if there had ever been one.

“Show me the vatch lock, then,” Loki said flatly.

“I can’t quite do it myself yet,” the Leewit said, “It’s a really hot one, so… take a breath or two first. It’s the same as the Nuri lock to start, but then the corners are kind of …” she drew a corkscrew shape in the air with one finger, “and inside-out, if that makes sense?”

Loki tipped his head regally. “It does,” he said, and took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

Tony made his way over to the corner where Peter clung to the ceiling. “Kid,” he muttered under his breath, “what the f- flip is going on?”

Bless spider hearing, because Peter dropped to the ground to mutter back at him. “He said something about allying against a common enemy, and not saying his name out loud, and now the Leewit’s trying to help him keep the bad- um, the badder guy that apparently exists? Trying to keep that other guy from listening in on, um, his brain. Or ours, I guess.”

Ohhh….kaaaay… 

There was a thump.

Loki, his face bright red, had fallen to his knees. Might have fallen further than that if the Leewit hadn’t put out a hand to stop him tipping over. “Told you it was a hot one,” she said earnestly.

There was a long silence. Tony closed his mouth, then bit his tongue. Peter fidgeted. Loki tipped his head up a little to look at the little witch - he was level with her collarbone, as she had been with him when they both stood – and wiped damp hair away from his sweating forehead. “You did,” he admitted, sounding hoarse, “but… it… worked. The ties are gone from my mind. I… I owe you a boon, Your Wisdom.”

Tony opened his mouth again, and shut it. Her Wisdom rolled her eyes and groaned. “Oh, brother,” she complained, “ _another_ one? Are you going to follow me everywhere and loom at people too?”

Vision and all three of the hapless males in the room blinked in tandem. Loki sat back on his heels. “Er,” he croaked, “is that the boon you wish to ask?”

“Great Patham, no!” The Leewit shook her head violently. “I didn’t even want the _first_ one!”

There was a shorter silence. Tony opened his mouth and closed it yet again. The not-quite-so-permanent perma-smirk reappeared on the god’s face. “Well, then,” he said briskly, “I’m certain we can come to some other mutually satisfactory arrangement.” He jiggled his shoulders a little, as if working out the kinks, and slowly spread his hands out to the sides. “Stark,” he said.

“Odinson.”

“Do not call me by that name again. Attend: I swear by the Norns that I will not act with aggression against you or your household or your allies, except in self-defense. I wish to negotiate for a temporary cessation of hostilities between myself and the protectors of Midgard, that we may share intelligence and take measures toward the defeat of the Mad Titan.”

“Ohhh, kay,” Tony said, “I’ll run it by my people and see what they have to say about it, but… personally I don’t see how you’d be that much worse than Doom.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“You’d think,” Tony complained, “That Loki showing up and offering to defect would be enough of an avalanche to tap-dance on for one day.” The god’s so-called “peaceful surrender” was the cue for an instant pissing match among the members of the Accords Council over jurisdiction and oversight, because people under stress revert to automatic behaviors. Nobody quite wanted to get too specific about what their agency of choice had on hand that would contain Loki, because people still didn’t get what “transparency” meant, and they didn’t have any handy-dandy Asgardian bondage gear this time. Not even the folks at the Revenge of the Son of the Bride of We Really Are the Good Guys This Time, Promise, or whatever Fury’s ex-agency was called this week. 

Someone mentioned the Raft, and Loki had smirked and bowed. “Absolutely. I could teleport there now, if you wish?” Which somehow made the Raft seem like less of a great idea.

Vision offered to stay with Loki as custody officer at least until he could give his beginning testimony and people (the smart ones, who hadn’t already made up their minds about what Loki had to say… so, like, at least three of them) could decide whether his offer of help was worth it and start deciding what, if anything, to do about the warning he’d brought. Tony, feeling like an asshole while he did it, pointed out that the Mind Stone had come to Earth as a tool of Loki’s and that Viz, weird as he was, was too valuable to risk if it turned out Loki could still use the Stone.

This refreshed the argument for another hour and put Vision in blue-screen mode for nearly ten minutes as he tried to run the numbers on a really incomplete data set. As a side benefit, Loki stopped smirking completely – looked a little nauseated, actually – and joined in the verbal fray, insisting that he had been just as much in thrall to the Scepter as Barton or any of his other victims. Which… interesting, if true. Tony remembered just enough of the creepy, subliminal feel of having the damn thing in his lab, before Ultron, that he didn’t dismiss the claim out of hand. Whether that meant it was a good idea or a bad one to make Viz the chief jailor for their unwelcome guest, he hadn’t a clue and wasn’t sure he cared. If they were arguing about that, then nobody was asking too many questions about why, exactly, Loki had chosen to make his grand re-entrance in some teenager’s bedroom in Queens. 

Tony doctored his HUD footage before he uploaded it to the waiting Council. Just… Just a little, really. Just the audio portion, which stayed fuzzed out from the time of the Leewit’s whistle until a while after he followed Loki into the elevator of the apartment complex and down to the waiting SHIELD van. The camera feed had been focused on Loki the whole time- just didn’t happen to catch the boy on the ceiling, or the spider mask on the desk – just a coincidence, really. 

Peter’s initial witness statement was nicely bewildered and scatterbrained, which was good because the kid could not lie worth a damn. He and the Leewit had been, um, hanging out? And all of a sudden she’d started glaring at this one corner of the room and talking to it, and … yeah, you pretty much saw the rest? And Peter had no clue, really, but he guessed it was something to do with the Leewit, right?

The Leewit, with a too-sharp glance at the audio pickup of his suit that told Tony she knew perfectly well she was being recorded, put on a noisy and childish performance with much blaming of “that stinkin’ Vatch,” and speculation that Loki might be “the mad one” she was supposed to help with? She was just a hapless kidnapped time traveler, what did she know? The whole thing was going to make her more of a target for the underhanded members of the council, especially with yet another whistle on the record, but at least it was in character with what they had on her so far. 

Later, when they finally, _finally_ got a moment to talk off the record, the Leewit admitted that she hadn’t actually “relled vatch” at any point in the encounter. “But if Loki somehow found out what we were doing with the sound feeds it makes sense for him to try and listen to the meeting from our end. Gotta be easier to hide in Peter’s bedroom than in the UN.” Which had been a whole additional thing, and thank _fuck_ Tony hadn’t known what they’d been up to sooner. They were going to kill him. These kids were absolutely going to fucking kill him.

So, yeah, that had been plenty for one day, right there. But just when Tony thought he’d have a chance to get out of the suit, take a shower, grab some sushi or something, maybe close his eyes for fifteen minutes before he had to do something else… that was when Dr. Strange showed up.

Or his voice did, on the comm channel that the Council could listen in on too if they wanted. “My apologies,” he said, “for not helping more with Loki. A few moments before your call a portal opened in the middle of my library. The person who arrived had a warning about an approaching threat, and I think you all need to be made aware of it as well.”

“Loki said something about that too,” Tony told his colleague. “Is this guy any more trustworthy, do you think?” 

Dr. Strange made an amused _hnrk_ sound. “I’m told opinions vary quite a bit, but you, at least, have had reason to trust him. His name is Bruce Banner.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, starting an IW crossover fic:"Well, I usually do slowish, character-based stuff when I write long fics, but I bet I could do a tightly plotted, rapid-fire adventure thing if I tried.” [Cracks knuckles]
> 
> Me, fifteen chapters later when I finally get around to adding IW content: "Nope. No, I cannot write tightly plotted anything." 
> 
> Oh, well. Hope y'all are having fun anyway. I am. (Mostly.)
> 
> Also, if you're curious, this scene was one of the first ones I wrote. This whole mess sprang from the observation that Loki and Goth actually have a lot of the same party tricks.


	16. What Loki Has to Say for Himself

Thank… “the Norns,” as their captive would say, (and also thank Friday’s excellent rapport with the communications satellites, not that Tony was about to admit that) that Secretary Ross had been in Beijing that week and nobody had been able to get him woken up and briefed before the dust settled a bit. Banner elected to stay in the Sanctum: umpty-who-knows-how-many other dimensions available on-call if Ross and his cronies tried to do something stupid. Tony sent a message to Stark Legal to step up a few things in their ongoing “Protect Brucie-Bear and the government from each other” project. It had taken something of a back burner these last few years, but it hadn’t ever completely gone away since 2012, and Tony thought they could probably work something out whether Bruce decided to sign the revised Accords or not. Particularly if, as he said, The Big One was coming. If Bruce was willing to work with Tony and/or Strange, then the Council would know where he was, and Ross’s longer game of trying to coerce tissue samples and that kind of shit could just stay long-term. It was tedious, but even Ross could prioritize, and if he couldn’t, well, Tony had been cultivating the _whole_ Council, and Ross wasn’t as in charge of it as he thought he was.

Strange promised to send a recording of Bruce’s initial debrief to the Avengers and the Accords Council both. It wasn’t, he warned, as informative as one could wish; Hulk hadn’t really submerged completely from the time of the Ultron fight until Thor had found him on the planet Sakaar, less than a month ago. “But it seems he’s had some interaction with Loki, toward the latter end of his… adventures. He should be able to provide some fact-checking.” 

Bruce’s voice could be heard in the background. “I actually saw him _die in front of me_ less than an hour ago, but whatever...”

And much to Tony’s relief, everyone (except probably Ross,) seemed to be willing to trust Bruce as a witness. Not even those Council members who had advocated reaching out to Latveria were comfortable doing the same for Loki, but then, Loki did not seem to expect them to. He submitted, without any more protest than an occasional smirk, to having his weapons confiscated, his extremities bound in chains that Dr. Strange vouched for, to being confined in a cell in an old SHIELD base in the middle of Saskatchewan. This acquiescence soothed exactly nobody.

Feathers did, however, unruffle a little after Vision foiled his first escape attempt, or rather, the moment Loki vanished from his cell and reappeared, fully armed, in the hotel room in Saskatoon where Tony was setting up a video conference. Tony had time for exactly one swearword before his phone chimed and Vision announced, “Loki is still present in his cell. He is bending light but not suppressing sound or brainwaves. And I would like to remind him that I am carrying the Mind Stone.” At which point the apparition vanished from the hotel room, Loki reappeared in his cell looking as if he had accidentally swallowed a frog, and Tony finished swearing and prepared to listen to a long interrogation.

It was a very long interrogation. Loki spoke, and Vision relayed questions from Tony, Rhodey, Dr. Strange, and the Council, for the next thirty-six hours or so. Voices faded in and out of the conversation over the comms as people took breaks for food or sleep or research. Tony stayed awake for the whole thing, though he would not go so far as to say he was alert or at maximum functionality. Whatever nightmares Loki’s testimony gave him were preferable to the nightmares he’d come up with on his own if he knew something like this was going on while he was sleeping. And Loki had some doozies. 

Their erstwhile enemy claimed, to begin with, that he had been under mind control during the Invasion of New York. (Mind control was rapidly becoming Tony’s least favorite excuse for poor behavior.) Loki kept citing moments from his first imprisonment that he claimed had been veiled warnings they had been “too stupid” to recognize, and insisted that the Avengers had won against the Chitauri because he had deliberately engineered the battle to create the bottleneck and give Midgard the advantage. (Rhodey’s voice sounded in Tony’s ear: “Or, he was trying to play both sides even then.” “Looks like he’s on Team Eidetic Memory either way,” Tony muttered back.)

Tony wished later he’d taken a nap during the next three hours of follow-up questions – ranging from contemptuous to furious – and back-room arguments among the Councilors, because it took that long for people to finish having feelings and agree that the interrogation was not a trial, nor was it (yet) an asylum hearing, and that it would save time to let Loki say his piece and save all the parts about how nobody believed him until afterward. Rhodey finally brought that one to an end: “If it’s real, and we do nothing, we’re screwed. If it’s bullshit, and we do something, we’re readier for the next thing that comes. Loki doesn’t have his staff or the Tesseract, and we still have a Hulk. I like our odds if he tries to move against us later.”

The real enemy, Loki claimed, the one who had loosed the Chitauri and Loki himself onto planet Earth, and done the same or worse on countless other realms, was a creature called Thanos, whose name it was unwise to repeat too often. The Titan had been ancient when Bor Ymirson was young, and exceeded Thor in might as Thor exceeded the heroes of Midgard. He sought conquest and destruction for their own sakes. “When he befalls a realm, he destroys it entirely: slaying all but the very few he enslaves into his armies. You think Midgard would have suffered under my rule?” Loki stood, shifting his shoulders as if throwing back an invisible cape and spreading his feet as far as the shackles would let him. He tossed his head and glared, not at Vision, but at the camera pickup. “The one who sent me cares nothing for rule – only for carnage,” he declaimed. “Every soul he extinguishes is a gift to his beloved, the Lady Death, and if he could do so, he would gift her with every soul on every realm at once, in all the universe. If he succeeds in his quest to gather the Infinity Stones, he will do exactly that. And two of those stones,” Loki took another breath, “are here.” And now he _did_ look at Vision.

Tony cleared his throat and spoke into his comm. “I’d like to summarize, then. We’ve got a big, nasty-ass villain headed this way because he wants our toys. If he gets them it will be bad news. Also, you, for reasons of your own, have a personal beef with said villain and are coming here to help because that way you know you’ll get a chance to do him some damage. That all about right?”

When Vision conveyed the question, Loki’s expression shifted to one Tony knew very, very well. It was the Politics Face, and it said, “While you have just missed or ignored every single nuance I tried to convey, nothing in your summary is actually incorrect.”

Tony pressed on without waiting for Loki to make any of the words that went with that face. “So can we count on help from the rest of Asgard for this little encounter? Sounds like they’ve got some skin in the game on this one.”

For an instant (four-tenths of a second, according to Vision,) Loki’s face crumpled into bleakness, before tightening again into icy fury. “You have all of Asgard’s might here before you now,” he growled through his teeth. “The Realm Eternal has met its end at the Titan’s hands, and all that remains of it now is that which it cast out.” He paused as if he could hear the gasps and outbursts of his remote audience, then cocked his head, rearranging his lips into a pretense of his usual sneer. “Well, that might not be entirely correct. The odds of any of the passengers of the last refugee ship being picked up after the ship in question was destroyed aren’t so bad: only two to the power of two hundred seventy six thousand, seven hundred and nine to one against. Thor has made battle plans with worse chances of success.” Loki threw himself back into his plastic chair with a force precisely calibrated to give the appearance of caring nothing for where he landed while not actually breaking the puny earth furniture. 

Back in the hotel conference room, Tony clutched his hair. “Is there any possible way for us to fact-check this asshole?” he whined to the world at large.

Dr. Banner’s voice floated back through his earbug. “I’m afraid… that one’s real. I was… I was there.”

Vision, purple and impassive, attempted a stiff pat or two on Loki’s shoulder. “My condolences, sir,” he said, “I am given to understand that your relationship with the realm was quite complicated and involving, and I surmise that your emotional response to such a turn of events would be equally complicated.”

Loki choked a bit, coughed, blinked. “I thank you, golem,” he said at last, “That was a… very creditable attempt at courtesy.”

Vision inclined his head. “Do you need a few moments, sir?”

“No.” 

“Or food, or water, or a chance to take care of biological functions? We have been talking for an extended time.”

“I am very well fit to continue, I assure you.”

“Alright, sir, if you are certain…” Vision listened to the babble from the comms as if he could make out more words than Tony could. Well, he probably could – Tony could multitask pretty well but actually picking out overlapping voice prints wasn’t his best thing, especially on this little sleep.

“We find it concerning,” Vision said, “that you and the other Asgardians have been consistent before now in assuring the residents of Earth that our knowledge and abilities are far inferior to your own. And yet you say, both that the Titan’s forces have completely wiped Asgard out of existence and that you expect the ‘inferior’ realm to mount an effective resistance.”

Loki stiffened. “I _expect_ nothing,” he spat. “Two of the stones have come to your realm and the Titan, perforce, also comes. Some few of you on Midgard will have the choice to die fighting or to die as lickspittles. The rest of you will, barring miracles, die without needing to make such a distinction.”

“And are you offering us miracles?”

“I am offering the information Asgard in her arrogance would not hear. In exchange for the opportunity not to die a lickspittle.” Loki rolled his head slowly from one shoulder to the other, his exaggerated, actorly expressions falling away into weariness. “The question of whether this will be enough to secure a miracle is, I would posit, not worth spending our time and energy on at the moment. If it isn’t, we still must behave as if it is, until the opportunity to obtain more help presents itself.”

Tony turned away from the monitor and let his burning eyes close for a few moments. It was this one again, he told himself wearily. He recognized this one. The one where the palladium is killing you and there is nothing else left to try. The one where you have to kill your father figure, or arrest your childhood hero, or tell Pepper how you feel with your very own mouth, using your very own words. Perhaps some of the Council still hoped Dr. Strange would come back in the next half an hour and announce that Loki was bullshitting them, that Banner was wrong, and Asgard was still as shiny and Kiplingesque as ever. Tony bore no such comforting illusions. If Loki, king of Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, had told a teenaged girl he was in her debt, in front of witnesses, then the world was already upside-down. Again.

“How did you come to be here in time to warn us?” Tony wasn’t sure who had asked that question, but Loki sat a bit straighter and gave Vision an approving nod when he relayed it.

“I believe,” he said, “that the Titan intended to put me to some use. I have not… Perhaps it’s best if I simply tell you in order. Those few of us who survived the fall of Asgard, together with your Dr. Banner, who had offered us aid in the last battle, were aboard a ship, making our way to a realm where we thought we might find refuge. We had with us one of the treasures the Titan sought: the space stone. Your people knew it as the Tesseract. He… he and his henchmen forced their way aboard and demanded the stone. I made an… unwise attempt to approach him as an ally. I had been his thrall at one point, after all, and I thought, perhaps he would allow me to get close enough to do some harm and buy the others enough time to… He did _no_ t allow it.”

Loki closed his eyes. His fingers, laced together on the table in front of him, clenched, digging into the backs of his hands. “He wrapped his hands about my throat,” Loki said quietly, “and began to squeeze. I saw the muscles of his arm begin to flex and knew that he would shake me as a dog shakes a rat, and that thus would I meet my end. And in that moment, I heard the Titan’s voice, echoing in my mind more than my ears, as if it resonated within my own chest. The ship faded about me as I hung there, craven yet in the power of that voice as I had not been since Asgard first pulled me from his clutches.”

Loki swallowed, staring up at some nameless vision in the corner of the ceiling with a clenched jaw and his hands curled into fists. His chest heaved.

“What did he say?” Tony hadn’t heard anyone else ask the question first. Vision must have come up with it all on his own.

“He said,” Loki growled, “ ‘Now that everyone thinks you’re dead, we can have some _real_ fun.’ I had never,” Loki took another breath, “In all my time of captivity, heard that… creature use the word ‘fun.’ I was… far from eager to learn what he meant this time, and I confess I still do not know what he had in mind.”

Loki let shoulders bow and his head drop onto his chest, and then looked directly at his human audience again. “And when the world faded in again around me, and I regained the use of my mind and person, I stood in a room that had, I believe, once been a part of SHIELD. I recognized it from Barton’s memories, though the disorder and the dried bloodstains on the wall were new. I cloaked myself as well as I could from all eyes, natural and artificial, and undertook reconnaissance. When I felt the Titan’s attention on me lessen, I attempted to plan ways in which I might undermine his mission and use the information I gathered to my own ends. And then,” Loki looked up again, the smile on his face this time not his usual rictus grin but something softer and kinder, “then my scryings directed me to the Leewit, blessed be her name and household, and she performed an act of _seidr_ no healer in all the nine realms has ever managed before, and broke the Titan’s hold upon my mind. He can no longer watch me, and I am free, for the first time in nearly ten of your years, to act unhindered.”

Fuck him, Tony thought, for bringing the Leewit into this. _Fuck_ him. The babble of voices around him rose again, and Tony flopped his head onto his arms and closed his eyes. He was going to fight the Council to save the world again, wasn’t he, dammit. He’d just been trying to build a system that would last instead of all this … improv, every time. That’s what science was supposed to be about, moving on to the next thing instead of fighting the same fights over and over… Rhodes was trying to steer the Council back into “gather data” mode again. Tony left him to it; Platypus had more credit for that kind of transaction anyway.

“Tones?” Rhodey’s voice in the comm. What had he missed? “You need more time, man, or can you make the call?”

Tony opened his eyes again and looked out the window at the broad, bright streets of Saskatoon. “Sorry, pookiebear, I got bored. What call?”

“Can you work with Loki if you have to?”

Oh, was that all. Tony made a croaking noise and swigged water from a bottle he didn’t remember opening. “Yeah,” he sighed, “yeah, if that’s what it takes. Roosevelt worked with Stalin, I can work with Loki.”

The com crackled with Rhodey’s breathing. “And how about… Wakanda?” 

He didn’t mean Wakanda, Tony knew, though Wakandan engineering would come in pretty handy against more aliens. _You’re saving the world because you like the world to be safe,_ he admonished himself, _not because you expect people to thank you. What do you want, a cookie?_ Tony sighed. “If – no, let’s assume it’s ‘when,’ because Murphy – when the fight comes into his territory, I can work with Mao too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why Saskatoon? 'Cause my offspring recently discovered Farley Mowatt, that's why.
> 
> I kind of assume that there are no Team Cap firebrands reading this fic because I left their people in Wakanda so as not to have to juggle _more_ characters... but in case you need to know… Team Cap, from Tony’s POV, is China in this scenario because China tends to view WWII as an added complication in the outcome of the Chinese Civil War, and Tony thinks Team Cap would do the same with an alien invasion. Which could just as well make Steve Chang Kai Shek, but that name has failed to stick in Tired Engineer Tony’s brain, plus Tony is still salty. 
> 
> The Leewit would be Team Cap if she plopped down into the middle of the Civil War instead of the start of the Infinity War. As it is, she is firmly on Team Get Me Off the Crazy Antique Dirtball, and the vatch stuck her with Iron Man, so she’s just going with it.
> 
> In other news, you'd think watching the flakes of ash drifting gently down from the mustard-yellow sky would be a perfect way to get in the mood for writing climactic battle scenes, but somehow this is not the case. None of my immediate family have to evacuate and are not expected to need to in the next day or three, and I've got enough of a buffer that one week's worth of writers' block is not gonna kill me or cause delays, but I just wanted to whine a bit.


	17. Cooking With Nerds

Of course everyone ended up going to the Compound. Somewhere in their labyrinthine political minds, the Councilors thought people at the compound were “under control.” And the best lab was there, and space for the Hulk, who was almost guaranteed to make an appearance sooner or later. Tony, Rhodey, Vision, and Loki all ended up riding the same SI jet from Saskatoon. Tony and Rhodey took turns dozing. Loki sat cross-legged on the floor of the aisle, hands on his knees, eyes shut, like a steampunk yoga instructor. Vision never took his yellow eyes off their … Tony wasn’t going to call him their prisoner. Or their guest… Anyway, the important part was Vision wasn’t likely to let him get away with shit, and that meant Tony could try to sleep.

When they climbed (in Tony’s and Rhodey’s case) phased (in Vision’s) or leaped (Loki, being ridiculously athletic and sticking a landing no human knees could have withstood) from the helicopter that took them from JFK to the compound roof, Strange and the Leewit were there waiting, looking much better rested. Perhaps they’d traveled by sling-ring express. 

And Bruce was there too, rumpled gray hoodie and all.

It had to be the sleep deprivation and the dry air of jet travel making Tony’s eyes water. That was his story and he was sticking to it. He knew, OK? He knew he would’ve lost Bruce anyway, once the Accords got signed if not before. Bruce couldn't have agreed to the original version and wouldn’t have been willing to put himself in the middle of any of the fights that followed. Hell, Bruce might still up and vanish as soon as he could, might decide he couldn’t work with anyone who had done what Tony had done these last few years. But dammit, Tony had missed the bastard, and he was glad to see him alive.

He showed this by pulling out his best publicity grin and flinging his arms wide as if expecting a hug. “Brucie-Baby! Welcome back to Candyland!”

To his astonishment, his science bro leaned in and _actually hugged him._ Nothing extreme, hands stayed at shoulder level, couple of back slaps – but it was a serious hug with serious squeezing. Tony squeezed back and wondered if this really was Bruce or some sort of alien doppelganger.

“You hug people now?”

Bruce stepped back a bit and smiled his little half-smile. “I’ve spent the last few weeks hanging out with Asgardians. Maybe it’s rubbed off a little. And… It’s good to see you again, Tony.”

“Yeah, yeah, missed you too, buddy. Do I have time for a shower before we get back to saving the world, do you think?”

Vision spoke up. “I have just received a message from Ms. Potts. She is tying up a few loose ends and will be joining us at the compound, arriving between seven and eight. By my calculations that gives everyone except the Leewit time for both a shower and a nap, which course of action I recommend for maximum functionality. The Leewit seems to be better rested than most of us and I recommend that she take a shower of no more than one hour’s duration. After that, she can assist me with assembling some sort of meal for the rest of you.”

The Leewit sighed and rolled her eyes. “Sure, I can do housework just fine, I guess. Just as long as you don’t keep trying to shut me out of things after this.”

“I will not allow them to,” Loki assured her, earning irritated looks from everyone else in the group. They hadn’t, Tony thought, been planning to leave the Leewit out; not when her alleged vatch had told her to help against “the mad one,” and both their newly-arrived green guys were talking about a so-called Mad Titan, but it shouldn’t be Loki’s call. And remembering that “favor” the god said he owed the witch was… Nope. Tony wasn’t going to think about it. He was going to take a nap. A _power_ nap, because he was not an old man.

“I will return to the Sanctum,” Strange informed them all. “I have research to do.” He did his irritating, scientifically impossible portal thing and stepped away. Tony yawned. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It occurred to Rhodey, as he wheeled himself into the common room two hours later, that they had assigned the evening’s cooking to a girl from an alien planet and an android. If he’d had a spare brain cell to think of the matter, he’d have assumed they’d pick out a couple of the pre-assembled and frozen things from the freezer and stick them in the microwave or the oven. But no, it seemed they had decided to mark the occasion with a more elaborate meal, and now a rich scent of garlic, rosemary, stewing meat, and… peanut butter? … wafted through the air. Vision hovered near the stove, tending a saucepan which, judging by the staticky noise, was being used as a deep-fryer. The Leewit had found a package of egg roll wrappers and was spooning… that was ricotta cheese, what the fuck, into the center of one. As Rhodey stared, incredulous, she plopped a line of blackberries into the cheese, like some insane version of ants-on-a-log, then folded up the egg roll in the usual fashion.

Just to make sure nobody mistook this for a normal evening, Loki strode in, his armor replaced by an apron printed with the chemical composition of Kansas City-style barbecue sauce. He slithered around the kitchen island, tapped Vision briskly on the shoulder, and then dropped to a crouch. Vision must have phased, because Loki literally reached through the android to open the oven door, poke at the contents, and then do something involving flashes of green light and another burst of scented steam. As he straightened himself up again and closed the door, Loki announced, “Fifteen minutes or so. Leewit, can you begin setting the table?”

“I can do that,” Rhodey suggested, pulling himself up out of his wheelchair. It would be good for him – keep his muscles from locking up again after the long flight. “Did you, uh, get a good rest in, Loki? We sure weren’t planning on making you cook, you know.” It was weird, making small talk with the invader of New York, but he was not about to be the first one to get rude. Rhodey might not have been in the diplomatic corps, but he knew a few things.

“It is of no matter,” Loki flicked a dismissive hand. “When I was – when I was younger, on adventures with my b- with my companions of the time, it was often my task to prepare the evening’s meat, if we were far from civilization. I find it… centering, in the current circumstances.”

Rhodes nodded thoughtfully at the cupboards. “I get that,” he admitted. “Would’ve guessed you’d go for the grill rather than the oven, in that case, but I get chicken out of it regardless, so I am not complaining.”

“Rabbit,” Loki corrected. “Vision gave me to understand that the local chickens were pets of your neighbors’.” 

“Um,” said Rhodey. “So you… hunted the rabbits, and then cooked them.”

“Summoned, rather than hunted,” Loki said, draping himself against the island and surveying the progress of the ricotta-blackberry egg rolls. “As we were rather short of time, and you people do not seem to hold a man’s stalking abilities in quite the same regard as the warriors of Asgard do.”

Rhodes sat back down in his chair, a bit abruptly, and clutched the stack of plates to his lap. “Yeah,” he said, “No. We usually order our meat in pre-butchered.”

“As attested to by the utter lack of even a rudimentary tannery on the premises. We shall all adapt, I expect.”

"…Yeah. Guess so.” After which Rhodey shut his mouth and wheeled himself over to the table.

Voices floated in from the hallway. Tony and Bruce had apparently found each other en route to the common room and were already deep in conversation when they arrived. “… used to waking up in weird places but this is just beyond, you know? And he’s like, ‘it’s a planet. You’ve been on planets before.’ ”

Tony snickered, but Rhodey caught the moment his friend’s eyes flicked sideways to take stock of the rest of the room, and he didn’t think the ensuing change of subject away from anything that might set Loki off was accidental.

“So I’m guessing that means you didn’t get a lot of time to look into any of the alien tech, then? ‘Cause I’ve been working on this sweet little dealie-bob based off what the Leewit remembers of the defense array on her home ship, and…”

“I don’t mind looking, Tony, but the Tesseract got taken by the wrong aliens. We need to plan for portals again.”

Tony’s shoulders slumped. “Well, fuck. Oh, well, I’ve got some ideas for that situation, too. We can… Later. Food first, or Pepper won’t let me work after she gets here.” Tony gave himself a shake and looked over at the trio in the kitchen; Rhodey could see the moment he recognized Loki’s apron. Banner walked up to Rhodey and offered to take his load of plates.

“The chair’s new since I was here last… is it… temporary, I hope?”

Boy, they were all just hitting each other’s sore spots tonight, weren’t they? Probably because everyone had so many of them. At least Rhodey had practice glossing over this one. “Spinal injury,” he said briefly, “about a year ago, now. Tones set me up with a pretty sweet exo-system works pretty well most of the time, but it’s been a long day.”

Bruce winced in sympathy. “Hope you got the bastards good, at least.”

Rhodey felt his expression tighten further. “It’s over,” he said briefly, which was probably also a lie, but it was as over as it was going to get. They had a new bunch of crazy alien bastards to chase away. Speaking of which, maybe he’d better check on Loki again.

As it turned out, the Leewit had him well in hand, whether deliberately or not, Rhodey couldn’t tell, but she was talking nineteen to the dozen about how her sister could have used her ‘porting talents to fix a whole bunch of egg rolls at once, but maybe not the rolling part, and she bet Goth’d be able to figure out how to use those sling-ring thingies, too… the Leewit was so jealous of the way the Kamar Taj contingent seemed to be able travel without the stinkin’ Egger route, and maybe Loki could help them figure out how to work together better… 

Rhodes would’ve bet money on Loki finding the stream of chatter irritating, rather than charming, but instead the guy’s expression was intent and abstracted, like Tony taking apart a new Hydra weapon. When the Leewit finished sealing the last egg roll and started cleaning up, Loki straightened from his slouch and followed her, even going so far as to snag the blackberry carton himself.

“When you speak with the residents of the Sanctum, you are doing so in English?” Loki took a step toward the fridge, as if to put the blackberries away, then stopped, looked at the carton, and tilted a corner into his open mouth instead.

“Mostly,” the Leewit shrugged. “Sometimes when it’s just Wong we use Cantonese instead. Why?”

Loki swallowed his blackberries. “Nuance,” he said, glancing abstractedly about the room until the Leewit plucked the empty carton from his hand and stuck it down the compost chute. “Thank you, Leewit. Is that little door for all waste or only organics? But surely a linguist such as yourself must be aware that words shift their meanings according to cultural context?”

“What kind of dope do you think I am?” The Leewit huffed. She dropped her ricotta spoon into the sink. “As if I’d miss something simple as that. It’s one thing with a new language and translating on the fly, but I’ve known English for megaseconds now.” 

Loki looked intrigued at this. “You truly acquire the whole of the language, then, colloquialisms included? Even the Allspeak is not quite so… thorough.”

“Sure.” The Leewit grinned at him. “It’s one of the things makes collecting swearwords so fun. F’rinstance, if you told me to tell the Chief Eater of the Megair Cannibals that he was a shitty little pissant, I could, but –” the Leewit emitted a collection of growling fricatives and a howl – “is almost nonsense in Megair. So I’d actually call him a—” and she produced another set of bloodcurdling noises, “instead.”

Loki actually smiled, and not his usual tooth-clenching grin, either, but a wide-eyed expression of delight. “Really. Let me see… for a tribe of cannibals, ‘bone-scraper’ is fairly self-evident, but why ‘dripping?’ Is the foulness of the substance they drip with taken for granted, or is it a reference to some bodily function?”

“They really, really don’t like getting wet.”

“Ah.” Loki chuckled. “We may have to explore this further at some point. Even if it does not ease matters between yourself and the sorcerers, the implications…” Loki allowed the thought to trail off and busied himself with the oven again. Rhodey blinked, remembering all of a sudden that he’d been meaning to fetch silverware.

Rhodey hadn’t been the only one listening, it seemed. Tony stared at the kitchen with a grin that made up for all the edge that Loki’s had lacked. “Holy shit,” he breathed, “Loki is a nerd!”

“More of a diva with hobbies, from what I’ve seen,” Banner spoke up from the couch. Rhodey noted the level of comfort that Mr. Mild-Mannered seemed to have with twitting their erstwhile enemy and resolved to have a good long think about it later. As an automatic response, it spoke volumes, but what, exactly those volumes said…

Tony waved dismissively. “So he’s a _humanities_ nerd,” he said. “That’s all right, nobody’s perfect. We’ll find him a poetry slam or something.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a member of the "CarrOt caKe will be JuSt FinE if I substitute beets for carrots" school of cookery, and I feel underrepresented by fandom mealtime descriptions. (The beet cake came out a little dry, tho.)


	18. Vatches?  We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Vatches!

The meal went smoothly, if quietly. Pepper arrived just in time to revive the flagging round of pleasantries about the food. Loki managed a classic humblebrag when she praised the tenderness of the rabbit – using magic to compress the needed cooking time was, according to him, “cheating.”

Pepper regarded him seriously. “In my experience,” she said, “any advantage a newcomer has that the establishment does not is categorized as ‘cheating,’ whereas those advantages that the establishment attempts to bar newcomers from are somehow ‘earned,’ even if one did nothing personally to attain them.”

Loki went still in a way that reminded Rhodes, suddenly and vividly, of the way Maria Stark used to go still, too proud to flinch, when her husband belittled her in front of guests. “Well said, Lady Potts. I am certain we both have seen many examples of that pattern, over time.”

Pepper chuckled gently. “I’m the female CEO of an established company who was raised in a double-wide; of course I have. One is normally allowed only two of the three, at most. Were you behind the blackberry egg rolls, too? I love them. They’re like a Google Translate version of cannoli.”

“No, that was the Leewit. But can you explain what 'Google' has to do with it?”

So that led to a discussion of globalization as it applied to fusion cooking, and the talk stayed small until Pepper took her hand off the wheel.

As soon as the dishes were cleared and Pepper took herself away to shower, the room went quiet and tense again. Tony moved toward the bar, then spun on his heel and marched himself to the couch instead. The others followed, perching uncomfortably on various pieces of comfortable furniture. Loki chose a bar stool, winding his long legs around the uprights. The Leewit sat on the back of a padded armchair, her stocking feet on the seat, elbows on her knees and chin in her hands. Bruce chose the couch, shoving himself back into the far corner and as if trying to become one with the throw pillows. The refrigerator hummed.

Loki was the one to break the silence. Without looking at anyone, he asked, quietly, “What happened, Banner, after I- after I was seen to die?”

Bruce took a long, slow, breath in and out. “Your … your body turned blue. Not like a strangling victim – cobalt blue, with a kind of sheen to the skin, and all at once, not gradually. Tha- the Titan opened his hands and let it fall. Heimdall said something about how, if you’d had any magic left, you wouldn’t have… something. I didn’t catch the end because Thor… snapped. And then the fight was on; I was – Well, the Other Guy hasn’t let me know much about the fight, even compared to usual. I… It was very confusing. Heimdall got hurt, somehow. He could’ve tried to… I don’t know. But what he did was call on all his magic and use it to send me back to Earth to warn everyone. I landed in the Sanctum. And you know the rest.” Bruce took another breath and twisted in his seat so he could face Loki directly. “I didn’t actually see anyone else die. But it didn’t… didn’t look good. I’m sorry.”

Loki blinked back tears. “It is… not unexpected,” he said. “I bear you no ill-will. And I suppose… did the journey harm you somehow, that you were only able to pass on your message yesterday? Were you in need of healing? Or did Strange keep the information back for a time?”

Bruce’s eyebrows went down and his nose wrinkled. “What? No! I remember crashing through the window, there was still glass on the floor when I sat up and told Strange Thanos was coming. He asked who that was, Wong ran in about five minutes later to say you were in Queens.” Bruce shook his head, gaze going inward. “This stuff always happens so fast,” he murmured.

Loki sprang from his seat in a blind panic, the stool toppling against the bar behind him. He stood in a crouch, eyes darting wildly. “No!,” he shouted, and then wrapped his arms around himself as if in pain. “No,” he keened, “it is not possible. He cannot… he cannot, no. I saw… no. Oh, Norns…”

Bruce, Tony, and Rhodes exchanged glances, trying to decide what to do next. Vision hovered uncertainly, possibly communing with Friday or attempting to summon Pepper. The Leewit jumped briskly down from her seat, strode up to Loki, and snapped her fingers under his nose. “Hey!”

Loki’s head went back a fraction and he glared at the witch.

“Quit blithering, you dope!”

He glared harder.

“Who can’t what,” the Leewit demanded, “and what makes you think it happened anyway?”

Loki’s hands unclenched, finger by finger. His shoulders rose and fell, rose again and fell, and his neck slumped. “He has the Time Stone,” he said to the floor. “I saw it here on Midgard, safe, for the moment, in the keeping of Strange and his people. I was certain that our enemy held only the Space and Power stones, that he had two to the two you held, with the other two still hidden, open to seekers from either side. But I have been played for a fool twice over and more; he has three stones to our one, and has managed, somehow, to replace the great relic of Kamar Taj with a forgery with none of us the wiser. Our last thread of hope has become a mere gossamer.”

“OK, that sounds bad,” Rhodey admitted, “And you think he has the Time stone bec-“ before Loki could respond, he answered his own question. “You’ve been here longer than Bruce, haven’t you. You ‘died’ and Bruce got beamed to Earth within the same hour, but you’ve had… how long? to gather intel and decide how you were going to make your approach before Queens?”

“Days,” Loki said flatly. “Time enough to rest, to acquire food and supplies, to manage a proper scrying spell and interpret the results, to evaluate the question of which of your power-holders it was best to approach.” He managed a faint sneer in Tony’s direction. “I doubt I would have chosen you, Stark, had the Leewit not forced my hand, but then, I did not imagine I would be so free of the Titan’s chains, either.”

Tony bristled, heaving himself up from the couch again. “You want someone else? Tell me who and we’ll fucking call them. Assuming we haven’t already. But I guarantee, whoever you talked to would have called me too. Well, unless you were a complete dumbass and picked Magneto or someone. Because I have a proven track record when it comes with people messing with my planet.”

“But the point,” Bruce interrupted, “is that the Titan manipulated time, and we thought he didn’t have the Time Stone.”

“I’ve just heard back from Kamar Taj,” Vision announced. “I had Friday call them. They assure me that the Eye is in their possession and is, in fact, currently in use, and therefor cannot be a forgery.”

Loki snarled, but made no comment.

Rhodes scratched his head. “Could it be a… a future version of the Titan got – or gets - the Time Stone somehow and is now retroactively manipulating things? So there’s two of them in the present reality?”

“No,” Loki told them. “There is only one Time Stone, in any time that can be reached from this moment. This much I know from my own researches on the Titan’s, and my own, behalf, and I am sure Strange will confirm it for us when he next contacts us.”

“You look agitated, Leewit,” Vision observed. “Do you have anything to add at this juncture?

The Leewit did indeed look quite twitchy and restless. She hadn’t left Loki’s side since first bringing him out of his hysteria, and now she stood with crossed arms and a tapping foot. “Why was you turning blue such a big clumping deal?”

Loki blinked, and his expression went from distraught to irritated, his nostrils pinched and his mouth a tight line. “The people I was born to are blue. I was transformed in infancy to more closely resemble my adoptive family, and that enchantment maintains itself in all but the most… extreme of circumstances. Such as my alleged death.”

“So there are other blue people?”

“Of course. I fail to see why this is relevant to our central problem.”

“Easy.” The Leewit grinned. “I know how he did it now.”

“The Titan?”

“The vatch.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Pepper re-entered the common room to the familiar (and, with this group, expected) sound of raised voices. Tony, the Leewit, and Loki all paced rapidly and erratically around the room, waving their arms and scowling at each other. Poor Bruce had shrunk back in a corner, looking pained. Rhodes was rolling his eyes while Tony held forth.

“ _Nobody_ knows what a vatch is, Brucie. They’re imaginary beings that only the Leewit can see – excuse me – rell, like Luna Lovegood and the crumpet sasquatch.”

“Did you mean crumple horned snorkack, Boss?”

“Shut up. You do not get to police my pop culture references. I will cut off your internet access and put you in charge of watching the toaster.”

“Does that mean I can stop monitoring incoming Hammer Industries emails for active threats?”

“No.”

“You are making exactly the same mistake as your Council,” Loki spat. “You are dismissing your subject-matter expert because her information does not match your preconceived notions.”

“I am drawing conclusions from weeks of observation, backed up by subject-matter experts Strange and Wong and co, none of whom have gotten a bead on this alleged creature.”

“I think it avoids them,” the Leewit said. “And you have so got your clumping outside confirmation. Vision detected it somehow practically first thing after I got here.”

Tony shot at betrayed look at Vision, who ignored him in favor of nodding stiffly at Pepper. “Good evening, Ms. Potts. I hope you feel refreshed, and I am sorry for our… disarray.”

Pepper smiled. “Only to be expected when something big’s going down. Is it productive disarray at least?”

“Right now, it seems like it’s mostly dick waving in the face of bad news,” Rhodes announced from his chair.

“Right,” Pepper said crisply, and intercepted Tony’s orbit to give him a hug. He hugged her back, with a mumbled, _no fair, hugs are cheating,_ but let her steer him back to the couch and then sit with her knees half over his lap, weighing him down. “Tony, sweetheart,” she began in her most saccharine, kindergarten-teacher voice, “this is the part where we listen, OK? Even if they’re wrong it saves time in the long run.”

“Fine.” Tony pouted, but snaked an arm around her and pulled her in. “Fine, we do it your way. But I want it known that I did in fact have dinner and a power nap and I refuse to be babied anymore tonight. I am a grown-ass superhero with science to do.”

“Mm.”

Bruce, nearly to the hall door, slumped in relief and settled in the Leewit’s armchair. Loki stopped pacing and stood, arms crossed, and looked down his nose at the rest of the room. “I should like to hear the Leewit’s theory, please,” he said. The "please" was a sneer.

The Leewit, still fuming, stuck out her tongue at her host, patron and chief legal protection against the ATCU, but she made a visible effort to collect herself, finally coming to a species of parade rest in the center of the room. She met the eyes of each of the other occupants in turn, as if daring them to interrupt. When assured she had the floor, she snapped out, “Fine.”

“So,” she said, “You dopes are getting all tied up in knots ‘cause it looks like the Titan sent Loki back in time. And he can’t do that without the Time Stone. Which he doesn’t have. So obviously, it wasn’t the Titan who got Loki to Yarthe. It sticks out all over. Someone big, and powerful, who thinks things are “fun” and doesn’t live in linear time? We’ve got one of those already. Same one who sent me here.”

“But I heard the Titan speak to me,” Loki said, but not as if he thought she was wrong.

“You sure about that?” The Leewit pressed, “or did you hear a great big voice in your head and assume it was the only other great big voice in your head you’ve ever had to deal with?” At Loki’s answering silence, she pressed on. “Sounds to me like Big Bossy must really want you for something. And it wanted the Titan to think you were dead too, ‘cause it went to the trouble of finding another skinny dead blue guy with huge ears like a fanderbag’s to switch out with you.”

Loki sputtered for several seconds while Pepper swallowed laughter, feeling Tony’s chest quiver underneath her. After a moment, though, the god sniffed and said, “The Jotnar, also called the Frost Giants, abandon their… undersized offspring to the elements in infancy. It is unlikely in the extreme that another such as myself would have been… available to put the use you are suggesting.”

“Vatches think linear time is silly,” the Leewit reminded him. “Betcha there’s lots, if you go back far enough.”

“That is still a great deal of effort.”

The Leewit nodded. “Uh-huh. Worries me, too. Big vatches mostly don’t push nearly that much.”

Bruce shifted in his chair. “I’m not really comfortable casting judgment on the behavior patterns of something I only just heard of for the first time and that may or may not exist, but it sounds to me like the Leewit has one workable hypothesis. I said _one_ workable hypothesis, Tony, don’t get all –” Bruce clenched a fist and growled, demonstratively.

Tony quirked an eyebrow. “That’s really more your territory, jolly green.”

Pepper sat up straighter and swung her feet back to the floor. “Let’s keep our eyes on the ball, here. The question of who meddled with the timeline doesn’t really affect what most of us need to do in the next few days: get as much help as we can and come up with a strategy for the next alien invasion. I sent out a directive to the SI directors to review our apocalypse protocols today and start Tier Two prep. Vision, if you haven’t already done so, can you confirm that groups like the X-Men have been warned? I don’t think we need a chain of command yet but we do need communications.” She looked back over her shoulder at her erring fiancée: “Tony, you and Rhodey and Dr. Banner need more sleep.” She turned back to the rest of the room. “Loki, I don’t know what you need physically but if you have ways to build up reserves, now’s the time.”

Loki smiled. “Indeed, Lady Pepper, I concur.”

But Pepper wasn’t done quite yet. “And working on the assumption that the vatch _is_ responsible for both your presence and the Leewit’s, you two should keep working together. We don’t know if the vatch is on our side or to what extent, but if it’s acting against the Titan, that’s good enough for me.”

Loki merely nodded. The Leewit looked thoughtful, opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again for a run of liquid, tonal syllables that Pepper thought sounded a bit like Mandarin, except she could usually pick out a few words here and there when people spoke Mandarin, and she couldn’t with the Leewit.

Loki’s Allspeak must have handled it just fine, though, because he looked startled and his cheeks colored. “I beg your pardon, Leewit, but that is a rather… fraught subject and I prefer not to discuss it in company.”

The Leewit, shrugged, unrepentant. “Guessed it might be,” she told him. “Hey! You had a chance to do any moving around lately, or has it all been sitting around in rooms? Want me to show you the gym? There’s a real whizdang climbing wall.”

“Lead the way, Your Wisdom.”

Tony sat up straighter. “Did the Leewit just make him _blush?_ ”


	19. Feelings, Ugh

“Pep?” 

Tony lay back with his eyes closed, feeling the gentle, warm, sweep of her fingertips as she brushed them along the lines in his forehead, across his eyelids, down the bridge of his nose, around the edges of his lips. So light, her fingers were, you’d think they had no force to them at all. But they defined his edges and his borders, warming them as they passed.

“Pep, you know I love you, but why are you here? I thought you hated this stuff.”

Her soft palm on his cheek, and the fingers again, carding the hair behind his ears, and down his jaw and throat, softly, softly, her voice in the dark. “Because it keeps taking you away from me.”

And he got it, he did. Hadn’t he felt the same way about Captain America, when he was a kid? And the SSR, and the parties, and everything else that kept his Dad busy? Not that he and Pepper had that kind of relationship. “I… I just need to know you’re safe, Pep. That you’re not going to have to deal with another Killian, or more space lizards, because there was something I could have done and didn’t. I mean, I’m flattered that you want me around and I’d be… shit, I need you so much, but… I mean, day to day, you’ve got shit to do...”

The warm fingers land on his lips again. “Tony.”

“Shutting up now.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it.” 

He opened his eyes. Hers, hovering above his face, were sad and calm. “Whatever it is that’s going down now, it’s bad. You’re willing to work with _Loki._ You wouldn’t do that for anything small.”

Tony let his head roll sideways on the pillow, his eyes sliding away.

“We’re not gonna let it get bad, Pep. I swear. We’re gonna figure it out, and we’re gonna kick this guy’s ass. …Somehow.” Tony was really not a fan of the way his voice dropped to a croak on that last word. He was worrying her. She did not need to be worried right now, OK?

“It’s bad,” Pepper repeated, and her voice was steady, if hoarse, but Tony could feel the first droplet splashing onto this chest, “and you’re going to do everything that you can. And that means sometime soon you’re going to get abducted again, or dive through a portal, or get stuck in Siberia on an off-the books mission, and you – you won’t have time then. Or my phone will go to voicemail or some damn thing.”

The air hissed into her lungs and the muscles in her back shifted under his hand – Queenie Potts was buckling down, stiffening her spine. “So,” she said, and he didn’t have to look at her to know she had blinked her tears away, firmed her jaw. “So. I will work remotely as much as I can from now until then, and I will eat every meal with you and I will drag you into bed every night, and I will tell you I love you every single chance I get. And you’ll tell me your things now, and over and over again, and you’ll go into whatever it is knowing you said them and I heard you.”

“Oh, god, Pep…” Warm, she was so warm.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Dr. Banner, may I take this opportunity to speak to you privately for a few moments?”

Bruce jerked and dropped his tea strainer. He’d locked that door, hadn’t he? He’d… the door was still closed, it was just that Vision’s face poked through it, like a macabre decoration, or the talking trees in… what the hell had that movie been called, anyway? “Don’t _do_ that!” Bruce snapped. “I am tired and overstimulated. We don’t need a code green right now.”

“My apologies,” Vision did actually sound contrite, which made him seem less like JARVIS. “I have been told it is impolite to phase through the floor, and the soundproofing made knocking ineffective. The matter is not urgent, if you would rather wait.”

Bruce took a few deep breaths. “On a scale of one to Secretary Ross, how likely is it to interfere with my sleep? Because I do need that.” He collected the strainer again and poked about in the nightstand drawer, squinting at the labels on the little foil bags full of loose-leaf tea. Had that been Pepper’s idea? Rose Hip, Hibiscus Mint, Lemon Ginger, Licorice… Lavender Chamomile, perfect.

Vision was, at least, not moving any further through the locked door. “I still find emotional effects rather difficult to predict, Dr. Banner, but the information I have is… personal, rather than global, and it does not involve harm to anyone you are known to care about.”

The hot-drinks machine was, not wall-mounted, but actually incorporated into the wall, like the soap dish in the shower. When Tony decided coffee was necessary to life, coffee became architectural, apparently. Bruce set a cup in the designated niche and said, “twelve ounces of hot water, please.” Then he turned and looked at Vision, waiting patiently and blank-faced halfway through the door. “Come on in, I guess.”

“Thank you.” Vision walked the rest of the way through the door, not bothering to open it. “Would it make you feel more comfortable if I sat down, or acquired a cup of tea myself?

“Um.” Bruce squeezed the handle of the strainer enough to open the clamshell and scoop up some of his chosen blend. “Yeah, have a seat, I guess. I’ll… be a couple minutes.” He wasn’t really a mantra guy, for all his use of meditation techniques, but he recited the periodic table to himself while the tea steeped and then settled down in the armchair opposite the one Vision had chosen. The scent of lavender helped. Earthly, grounding. “So.”

“I wished to inform you,” Vision said, posture carefully relaxed and open, “that I have maintained lines of communication with … those of your former colleagues currently on the other side of the political divide. There are topics we do not discuss. But if you wished to have a message conveyed to Ms. Romanov, it could be done.”

Bruce took a slightly too-hot swallow of tea. Natasha. It hadn’t occurred to him. Jesus, that had been… years, wasn’t it? And even if Bruce didn’t have very many memories of those years, the memories he did have were… intense. And Vision’s attempt to look friendly would be a lot more effective if he’d _blink_ now and then. Bruce cleared his throat. “I… thank you for the offer. I don’t think… I have anything to say to her, particularly. Um. I have no idea what the decision is in terms of, of who needs to know I’m back, but… I personally don’t have a problem with them knowing I’m alive. Unless they start campaigning.”

“They will not do that,” Vision said, with certainty this time. “Wanda and I have established our boundaries very clearly.”

Bruce blinked. “ ‘Wanda and I?’ You two are… a thing?”

“Yes,” Vision said simply.

He was going to regret asking, Bruce thought, but he said, “how?”

Vision looked out the window, at the darkening garden. “From the beginning,” he said. “I have wondered if it is built into me, if Wanda influenced the Mind Stone as it influenced her, and her needs were among the patterns that formed my initial matrix.”

Bruce clenched his hands around his tea mug. “That… that does not sound like the healthiest thing,” he said, “but I’m no role model, so.”

Vision shrugged, precisely. “It may be that some element of the irrational is necessary to prevent the kinds of errors Ultron made. I am… content.”

“Oh.” Bruce took another sip of tea. “Well, good, I guess. I… Natasha and I weren’t like that. At least, I know I wasn’t and I hope she feels the same… so… no messages.” Bruce was pretty sure he couldn't have been like that, not even with Betty. He’d seen the kind of love Vision was talking about at its absolute worst, decades before the accident. He had no faith in it. And on top of that… he’d disciplined himself away from feeling any of his emotions too strongly. More than half the time, he had to deduce what he felt by watching what he did. And a review of his behavior patterns showed it clearly: love wasn’t important enough to Bruce to make him persist when things got hard. Survival was, sure. And science. And… not much else, really. Bruce didn’t imagine that this made him a good person, but it was what he had to work with.

Vision was still sitting across from him. Bruce stood. “Well, thank you for the offer, Vision, I’m… glad you trusted me with this. But, um, I really do need to be going to bed now, if you can...”

“Certainly, Dr. Banner.” And Vision, without changing his posture, phased down through the floor. Bruce suppressed a frustrated whine, took several deep breaths, and settled down determinedly to drink his tea.

^^^^^^^

In the space of the walk from the common room to the gym, Loki had shed the apron and reacquired his armor, without the Leewit noticing. She’d thought at first he just did a lot of light-shifts, but she extended her klatha senses, and… nope.

“Are you shapeshifting your clothes out of your skin?”

The question won her an outraged squawk. “That’s revolting!”

The Leewit couldn’t see why, but she wasn’t about to argue. “How do you do it, then?” she asked. It was a pretty neat trick. She wouldn’t mind learning it if she could.

“I teleport objects into the space I wish them to occupy. It takes little more effort to move clothing onto oneself, rather than a heap on the floor in front of one, particularly if one is practiced.”

The Leewit let out an impressed, sound-only, whistle. “Nice,” she said. “How far away can your storage bin be and still have that work?” She shoved the gym door open and blinked her eyes against the flicker of the automatic lights coming on. 

When she glanced up at Loki again, he was smirking. “The size of the ‘storage bin’ is of greater concern. For those few things like my armor and weapons that I absolutely must not lose, I do a partial summoning, which I complete only when the object is required. The rest of the time, they are… in-transit.”

The Leewit clapped her hands in excitement. “Great Patham, that is clumping awesome! I wish you could get to meet Goth; she’s a shifter and a ‘porter, like you, but you’re lots better. She’d pick up all kinds of neat ideas, I bet.”

Loki preened, then sobered. “The risk,” he said, eyes gone distant again, “is that the safety of your possessions then depends on the integrity of your personal enchantments. If one is such a neophyte as to be unable to maintain a spell in one’s sleep, the partial summoning trick is better not attempted. And even for an adept, if one loses...” He stopped and closed his eyes, breathed in hard through his nose, “Anything that would unseat any other personal spell could also destroy whatever you have in transit, or allow other mages to get hold of it.”

“ ‘Course,” the Leewit said, momentarily bewildered, and then bit her lip. If he was saying something that obvious… it had probably happened to him. Someone had gone deep enough to get between him and his spells. Any Karres witch would have dis-minded themselves before it got to that point, but maybe Loki didn’t know how. Her gut clenched and she jumped up to perch on a chin-up bar, just to have something to do. She watched Loki prowl around the edges of the gym, prodding curiously at various pieces of equipment, bouncing on his toes to test the surface of the sprung wooden dance floor, the boxing ring, the concrete under the weight machines. “Does that have anything to do with why you went all funny when I asked you about whether you could be the ‘cold witch’ Big Bossy told me to be on the lookout for?”

Loki sprang, whirling, into the air and landed in a fighter’s crouch. After an instant’s hesitation, he continued the motion into a series of jabs, kicks, and rolls. It all put the Leewit in mind of the way the trained felids in the circus would groom themselves briefly to restore their dignity after muffing a trick. As well as being pretty spectacular to watch for its own sake. Loki straightened upright and brushed a wayward lock of hair out of the way. “In point of fact, no,” he said, as if their conversation hadn’t been interrupted at all, “Or rather, not directly. Two sets of… unpleasant memories, at opposite ends of a lengthy series of unfortunate events.”

He turned to the mirror and began a series of stretches. The Leewit, after a moment, followed his cue and moved to the dangling gymnastic rings above a foam pit beside the dance floor. (She did this by flipping from the chinup bar to the heavy bag, shimmying up the chain that suspended it from a ceiling beam, scootching along the beam, and then sliding down the ropes to plant her feet in the rings, because Loki was not the only one on his dignity here.) She swung back and forth, working various core muscles and then stretching her legs out in the splits, while Loki continued his own practice. 

“I believe I told you that I was a fosterling? A Jotun, raised by Aesir.”

The Leewit met his reflection’s eyes in the mirror. “Uh-huh.”

“Well, I did not learn of this until quite recently: some seven years ago, as you measure time, which counts for less among long-lived peoples than it does for such as you. I was… only just barely an adult, then, and… not in a fit state to receive unwelcome news. I’ll not bore you with the details. But I had reason, through the actions of those I thought to be my blood family, to feel ill-used. And then I learned that I was truly not of their kind. And I learned further…” He went silent for the length of another fast pattern of moves. “The Jotnar – called Frost Giants – and the Aesir have been deadly enemies for three generations. I had been raised on stories of heroic triumphs over the perfidious Jotnar, of the wicked, child-stealing Jotnar who would eat up bad little boys, of the brutal, bestial Jotnar who would destroy the nine realms if not kept in check. And then I learned I was one. And I spent no little time and effort, after that, performing as a Jotun was expected to.” He held his final pose, breathing hard through his nose as if the routine had actually been physically challenging. He flicked his eyes up at the Leewit’s reflection. “And then things got worse.” 

The Leewit startled badly, losing her grip on the hanging rings and plunging down among the foam blocks in the pit below. “Your family lied to you?” she shrieked from the depths, “Your _family_ lied?” 

“Odin lied to everyone,” Loki said bitterly. He walked over to offer her a hand up, which the Leewit accepted without any hesitation. In fact, she let her legs go limp and gave Loki all the work of hauling her out of the pit, which irritated him all out of proportion. 

“And each of his lies stole another name from me. I am not Odinson, nor ever was. I am not Loki of Jotunheim, for I went there as an enemy and slew my kinfolk, believing what Odin had taught me of that realm. I am not Loki of Asgard, for Asgard was destroyed fighting the daughter whose existence Odin hid. I had a chance to be Loki of Sakaar, for a time, but rejected it when Asgard called me back, only to be lost to me once again, at the end.”

Loki studied his own hands. “Perhaps I should style myself Loki Thorskin. My late brother has been… more consistent than any other thing in my life, for better or worse. I was trying to save him, when I went to the death your vatch stole me from.”

The Leewit nodded thoughtfully. “Makes more sense than naming yourself for a place, anyway. Even if Thor sounds like kind of a dope.”

The word _dope,_ in the Leewit’s mouth, took up strange echoes in the Allspeak. It did not indicate a mere fool, which was how most of her companions seemed to interpret it, but a person who deliberately diminished their own intelligence: more like _sot,_ or _lotus-eater._ Thor had certainly been encouraged in that direction, Loki thought, but what he said aloud was, “And yet you name yourself ‘the Leewit of Karres.’”

“Sure, but the planet is named after the people of Karres, not the other way around. It’s all about what you’re willing to do and why that makes you Karres or not. Take Captain Pausert: _He_ grew up on Nikkeldepain. He’s been on Karres the planet maybe three times in the last seven years, and his klatha’s mostly all this crazy wild stuff he invented himself, even if he’s picked up a few of the tricks Goth and me grew up with. But he’s Karres to the bone, for all that.”

Loki eyed the girl narrowly. “Was that an invitation? Because I rather doubt that I wish to become Loki of Karres.”

The Leewit resumed her stretches and contortions, having better luck with them now she was on solid ground. “Don’t see why you couldn’t if you wanna,” she said after a while, sounding earnest but looking impatient, “I know you and me could work pretty good together if we had to, ‘cause your powers are a lot like Goth’s, and Goth and me were _really_ good.”

“Were?” Loki repeated, calling up his _seidr_ to run in sharp green flames along his arms and around his hands, for the sheer pleasure of feeling the so-called “vatch lock” snap into place, hiding Loki’s power from Thanos, from Heimdall in the unlikely event the guardian had survived, from Big Bossy the vatch, if that was truly the entity he should credit with his timely return to Midgard. Loki had found, here and there in the past few years, many sources of glee, of amusement, even a few of comfort. But safety. Safety had been in short supply indeed.

“Did something happen, that you and your sister are no longer… in accord?”

The Leewit, upside-down, made a farting noise with her tongue. “She fell in _love.”_

“Ahh...” Beneath her carefully cultivated facade of callow youthfulness, the Leewit, Loki reminded himself, was young and callow. “Rather bad form, that. Is Goth so very much older than you?”

The Leewit kicked over backward and rolled back up to a sitting position. “ ‘Bout four years. Well, more than that now. We were born about four years apart and then she got sent back in time a few times. So, more like five or six years now.”

Just enough of a gap, in other words, for the younger sibling to imagine herself nearly her sister’s equal, given time, and for the elder to be incapable of picturing any such thing. Loki hummed in sympathy.

“And I know it’s stupid to get all wound up about it,” the Leewit said to the ceiling. The thin tone of her voice might have been emotion or merely the effect of bending her spine backward and stretching her diaphragm in the wrong direction. “There’s about a million more important things going on. And Pausert’s not a bad old dope, really. I kicked around with him and Goth quite a while and he was real good to both of us. But he’s not _everything,_ like Gothy seems to think all of a sudden, and I’m not… oh. Oh, wow, that’s _neat!”_

“Thank you,” one of Loki’s doubles said. “I must say I agree,” said another. He had begun the exercise in the interests of distracting the child from her troubles, which sounded too familiar and about which he could do nothing, but it didn’t take long for the girl to surprise him again.

She made no effort to dodge any of the illusions, even as they began to separate out and engage in differing maneuvers, and kept her gaze fixed on the actual Loki while she began to pelt him with questions. “Can you do as many of those as you want? Can they do anything real, or are they just for distraction? Can they look like different people?”

Loki tried to remember the last time someone had displayed actual curiosity about one of his workings, rather than simply dismissing it, (in the case of the Warriors Three, and sometimes Thor) or making use of it (Thor, the rest of the time, and the Grandmaster) without asking further questions. Perhaps he should have sought out the company of children more often. But no, he would not have been allowed. “Yes, it depends, and yes, but it is not usually worth the effort.”

“Depends on what?” Now the Leewit circled one of the doppelgangers, peering at it.

“Only one of us can be real at a time,” her chosen double told her, midleap, “But I can, for – no, not for a price – I can, _at a cost_ , alter which one quite quickly.” Another nearby illusion solidified just long enough to tap the Leewit briskly on the shoulder. 

She hardly startled at all; seemed to have followed Loki’s intangible essence as it flew from one of his selves to the other. “Neat!” she said again, “and I bet you have to ‘port yourself and your knives too. Wouldn’t it be better to have a whole bunch of weapons you could move around instead of a whole bunch of yous?”

It had been even longer since anyone asked him _intelligent_ questions. “Teleportation is not telekinesis,” he informed his… student? Had he somehow acquired a student, in these last desperate days before Thanos arrived? “I can change locations easily enough, but the power it would take to impart velocity would better be used in a direct attack.”

“Huh.” The Leewit plopped down onto the floor, her own exercises forgotten. “How about ‘porting something to someone’s insides, then? Goth did that once; Captain had got himself mind-controlled by a telepathic plant and she ‘ported the antidote into his stomach. But you could do the same with poisons, or sharp things.”

Loki was so astonished that his doubles all started doing the same moves in sync, and two of them fizzled out altogether. Why _hadn’t_ he ever done anything like that? Thanos and the Other would have been protected against such interference, and he’d been too weak and scattered to manage it then anyway, but… after? Or before? He looked again at the Leewit. Was this newly discovered bloodthirsty streak of hers the carelessness of a child who had never seen real battle, or… “Has Goth never done that, then?”

The Leewit hugged her knees. “Most of the things we’ve had to fight, taking the body apart doesn’t do much good,” she said to the mirror, and Loki decided abruptly that it was time to retire for the night.


	20. Teamwork is Hard

This had to be the first breakfast meeting Tony had ever endured that left him feeling better at the end of it than the extra sleep would have done. Whatever had happened to Loki in the last few years had improved his manners. He had dominated the meeting, but he’d done it with nary a monologue or a threat, nothing but clear, cogent intel. Tony found himself comparing it with what SHIELD had seen fit to tell him the last time they had a Tesseract to worry about, or any of the times he’d had to work with Thor, and found himself wishing for a magic wand that would let him have worked with this guy instead, starting from…. whenever wouldn’t have been too late. 

Over a breakfast of coffee and… other things that weren’t coffee, some of which Tony probably ate, Loki gave them the rundown on the size and capabilities of Thanos’ forces (astronomical, on both counts) and on the Titan’s closest and most trusted lieutenants (promptly dubbed the Five Horsemen by Rhodey), who were the most likely candidates for a pinpoint, rather than brute force, attempt to recover the Stones. “Which is what we had best hope we are facing,” Loki advised. Life-sized, full color, 3-D renditions of the Titan and the Horsemen stood lined up against the wall in front of the SmartBoard, courtesy of Loki’s illusion abilities. Behind each of them, on the computer display, were summaries of all known information: Names, species, history, fighting styles, both physical and otherwise, known and suspected weaknesses both emotional and physical (distressingly few of those, on either front.) All the physical data was in useful metric units, not only for mass but for temperatures and pressures necessary to do damage: an engineer’s dream. Tony had been impressed.

Loki was not holding back at all on his end of the bargain. He had, furthermore, taken questions from both those at the table and those teleconferencing in without sneering or even rolling his eyes, no matter what tone his interlocutors used. The answer to many if not most of the questions was “I do not know,” sometimes followed by “If I had to hazard a guess...” but that was only to be expected when Loki had not, himself, been a part of the inner circle whose beans he was spilling. Some of the Accords Council got a little sneery about it, which Rhodes tried to shut down. After all, the Counselors weren’t there in the room with them and wouldn’t get zapped if something pissed Loki off. Everyone present, virtually or actually, had blinked a bit at the Leewit’s few questions, which had to do with things like the chemical composition of the Horsemen’s bones, and the frequency ranges of their hearing. Nebula and her various technological enhancements made the Leewit’s eyes light up and her grin sharpen into something that made Tony want to hide the bots away from her.

So. Productive meeting. They had a plan now. Or at least the start of a strategy; it was more than they’d had when the Chitauri attacked. From here on out, Vision and Dr. Strange would both stay within reach of backup at all times. And stay at least twenty miles away from each other. If either one of them got attacked, both the monks and the New Avengers would get alerted immediately and haul ass to get to the action if they could. Whichever one of the stone keepers got left in the clear (if either of them did) would likewise contact the second tier reinforcements and get to safety. The details of the secondary reinforcements were left hazy while the Council was listening in; they all involved locations requiring the letter W and plausible deniability. When Ross started making noises about a preemptive strike against the Titan, Rhodey cut him off before Loki could open his mouth. “Yeah, you give us some idea how we’re supposed to track him down and travel a couple hundred light years before he teleports here and we’ll see what we can come up with. Now, I very much appreciate everyone taking the time to meet with us, and we’ll let you know if we find anything more. Meanwhile, we’ve all got shit to do. Let’s get cracking.” At which point Friday cut the feed from the Council and everyone took a deep breath.

Tony, wanting to end on a high note, looked around at his tablemates and tried a grin. “All right,” he essayed, “let’s keep that momentum going. Who wants to come out with me to Hangar Three and get a look at my newest thing and then maybe run some training patterns or something? Give Big Green and Little Green a chance to stretch their legs a little?”

Loki dropped his spoon with a clatter and sprang upright. He loomed down over Tony with flared nostrils and popping eyes, and, completely failing to manage any words, shrieked in rage, right in Tony’s face, then stormed out of the room. The simulacrum Horsemen along the wall vanished.

Vision tilted his head, then stood up, phasing rather than bothering to push the chair back. “I think perhaps I should keep an eye on our guest,” he said, and headed out through the table and one of the walls.

Rhodey and Bruce both stared at Tony, jaws hanging open. He twitched, defensively. “What?”

“Tony.” Rhodey wasn't calling him “Tones,” or “Dude,” or “Man...” that was bad.

_“What?”_

“Seriously? You had to push buttons now? The guy lost his entire family less than a week ago and he still held it together enough to give us all that.” Rhodey waved a hand at the SmartBoard.

“I thought he hated his family.” Rhodey just looked at him and let him come up with the parallels himself. “...Yyyeah,” he muttered, “in retrospect, that was not one of my brighter ideas.” He shook his head briskly. “Oh, well. Invitation still stands. Wanna come out to hangar three?”

Rhodey creaked upright. “Sure,” he said, resigned.

Bruce rolled his eyes. “Your newest thing is the Mark… whatever Iron Man suit, isn’t it.”

“Well, yeah, you were expecting a Hulk-sized skateboard? We already got you a nice, shiny, court injunction that’s keeping Ross off your back for the time being, and that on almost no notice. Don’t get greedy.” Tony wagged a finger at Bruce in lighthearted admonishment.

“And I thank you very much for that, Colonel Rhodes,” Bruce replied, making Rhodey grin and Tony squawk in mock outrage. Bruce smiled back at them. “Sure, I’ll come see your new toys.”

The Leewit, through all this byplay, had been gobbling her way through the last of her breakfast and snatching a bagel and a pear for later. She didn’t know if there was something in the Yarthian food that kicked some buried genetic switch into high gear or whether she’d just been due for a growth spurt anyway, but she’d been hungry _all the time_ lately. And the last time she’d tried putting on the clothes she’d worn when the vatch first snatched her away from home the trousers had been a good two centimeters too short and barely slid on over her hips. It was lucky her jacket still seemed to fit fine because Yarthe had a weird taboo against usable pockets in women’s clothing, and she needed someplace to keep her bagel and pear. As everyone started getting up and making their way toward the door Loki had stormed out of, she snatched up the last two sausage links from the serving plate and bolted them down. The new human, Bruce, stood holding the door for her, looking both troubled and friendly. The Leewit paused in the doorway.

“Can you explain what in Patham's fifth hell all that was about?” she complained, “What set Loki off? And why are you 'Little Green,' Dr. Bruce?”

For some reason, the question made Bruce giggle: a choking, slightly hysterical sound at the edge of a sob. “That,” he said when he finally got himself under control and followed the Leewit out the door, “Is kind of a long story. Maybe I can fill in some gaps for you on our way to… Friday? Where do we go to find Hangar Three?”

^^^^^^^

Bruce and the Leewit walked slowly, letting Tony and Rhodes stride out of sight, while Bruce tried to explain the Other Guy and his history with Loki. It went, Bruce thought, about as well as could be expected. The Leewit's sanguine acceptance of his story was neither unfamiliar nor comforting. Much as he might wish otherwise, neither warnings nor camera footage ever seemed to be enough for some people to fully get how dangerous the Other Guy was. It might be different now, after… whatever had happened to the Hulk on Sakaar. Bruce had the idea that he must have learned at least a little self-control in that… alien gladiator ring or whatever it had been. But when his memories were so fuzzy it was hard to have any kind of comfort level at all with a little slip of a thing like the Leewit being anywhere in range.

Then again, Bruce reminded himself, he didn't have any clear sense of what the Leewit could do, either, beyond the universal translation thing she'd done last night. He had a vague impression from Tony that she wasn't as powerful as, say, Wanda Maximoff, but Loki said he owed her a favor, for “an act of _seidr_ unlike any I have seen before,” which didn't exactly scream _helpless damsel,_ either. Besides, he'd warned her, and what else was to be done except wait and see?

The crunch of gravel and the Leewit's cheerful, “Morning, Pepper,” interrupted Bruce's wallowing.

“Morning.” Even in her running gear and devoid of makeup, Tony's patron goddess exuded an aura of serene authority that downgraded Loki's best efforts from _prince in exile_ to _trust fund brat._ “Out for a walk?”

The Leewit bounced on her heels in a mannerism that seemed, to Bruce, a little young for her age. “Gonna go see a demo of the latest Iron Man armor,” she announced, “and maybe do a little team training.”

“Oh?” Pepper's smile grew a little less happy. “Well, can't miss that. I think I'll join you.”

“N- uh, really?” Bruce had to squash the visions of Tony's fiancée and CEO being flattened in a Code Green gone wrong. “Uh,” he flailed, “I mean, uh, I was under the impression that you didn't want to be involved in… in that side of things.”

“I don't,” Pepper said crisply, “generally speaking.”

“So...”

And now Pepper's smile grew distinctly acid. “Bruce,” she said, “If you had watched more terrible television, you would know that when the Other Woman throws a party, you have to show up at it.”

“Um,” said Bruce, entirely out of his depth, and started walking again.

^^^^^^

To Bruce's mild surprise, Loki and Vision waited in the hangar along with Tony and Rhodes. That had been fast, he thought. Nobody exactly looked happy to be there, but nobody was actively snarling, either. Vision and Rhodes had both placed themselves as-if-coincidentally between the two erstwhile combatants. Tony, nearer the open bay doors, caught sight of the approaching trio and his face lit up as he turned to meet them. “Hey! Pep!”

The sequence of events after that was so quick and confusing Bruce wondered for a moment if he'd hulked out. Tony, his face alight, sped out through the doors to sweep Pepper up in a passionate kiss. Loki, further back in the hangar, started forward, his mouth open as if about to say something, while Rhodes and Vision looked rapidly back and forth between them. Then there was a resounding _CRACK!!,_ and then it was Loki, standing a few feet away from an incandescently furious Pepper, rubbing his chin bemusedly, while Tony pelted out the bay doors, somehow already suited up.

Bruce couldn’t make out anything anyone was saying. Rhodes, still back in the hangar, seemed to be trying to decide whether he needed to suit up or not, while yelling at Tony. What he was yelling got garbled with the cascade of swearwords and threats Tony was producing. Bruce would have expected Loki to be smirking in amusement, but instead “Little Green’s” expression seemed to flicker between rueful and intrigued. Whatever he was saying was too quiet to make out over Tony shouting. The Leewit, beside him, seemed to be trying to suppress a fit of giggles. And deep in the back of his brain, the familiar basso growl of the Hulk remarked, _STUPID._ Which honestly seemed like the single most relevant word to apply to the situation right now. 

With a heavy, metallic clunk, Tony crashed into Vision, who had inserted himself into Tony’s path and now clamped both his vibranium hands over the shoulders of the Iron Man armor and held him out at arms’ length. If Tony had been meaning to do serious damage, he still could have fired up a repulsor beam, but instead he simply hung from the android’s grip, catching his breath. “This is not the time, Mr. Stark,” Vision chided, and Tony muttered something that didn’t make it out through the helmet speakers. 

Rhodes, seeing that Vision had the immediate emergency in hand and that Loki apparently did not choose to retaliate further, gave over the effort to get into the War Machine armor and simply jogged over in his braces and gauntlets. One of the more distractable parts of Bruce’s brain noted, admiringly, that the exo-system that gave Rhodes his mobility was, indeed, “pretty sweet.” The Colonel took his place within reach of Loki and struck a distinctly maternal pose: legs at shoulder width, hands on hips. “You two assholes done now?” he inquired. He looked slowly from one mad genius to the other, waiting for them to nod. 

Loki did so at once, expression cool but edging toward smugness. Tony waited for Vision to set him on his feet and the Iron Man faceplate to slide out of the way. He turned his head to the side. “You OK, Pep?”

Pepper did not look particularly OK. She looked as if she were plotting dire retribution and was simply waiting for everyone to stop talking so she could explain it in detail. And possibly with a PowerPoint. “For the moment,” she said.

“OK,” Tony said, and looked back at Rhodes.

“OK,” his friend repeated. “You are going to apologize. Both of you. You first, Tones.”

And Stark did that thing he did sometimes, where he suddenly pulled a metric ton of sincerity out of somewhere. He looked Loki straight in the face, unsmiling, his voice soft. “I’m sorry I was an annoying asshole. I wish I could promise it won’t happen again, but there is a lot of scientific data out there about trying to break bad habits under stress and this is a pretty stressful situation, so, yeah, that one’s not in the cards. I do promise to apologize the next time too. In fact, all the times after that as long as we’re working together, and if we survive the next few days we can look into more long-term solutions.”

Rhodey facepalmed and shook his head slowly, but Loki simply nodded. “Apology accepted,” he said briskly.

Bruce blinked. “Really?” he asked, without thinking. “That was enough for you?”

Loki’s answering smile was a tight, thin line. “I am well-versed in the art of working in tandem with those who neither like nor respect me, and vice versa. Stark is, by their measure, a rather mild irritant, and is at the least self-aware.”

“Ohhh…..kayyyy...” Rhodes’ expression spoke volumes, but none of them made it out of his mouth. “Are you willing to apologize, Loki?

“Certainly.” The godling straightened briskly, nearly clicking his heels together, then turned his back on Tony entirely. Before anyone could protest, Loki then walked over to Pepper and dropped to one knee, bowing his head. “Lady Potts,” he said, “please accept my humblest apologies for having ill-used you so. I should not have allowed my dislike of your consort to impinge upon you, no matter what the provocation.”

He kept his head bowed, and so (apparently) missed Pepper’s brief crogglement and Tony’s smirk. After a moment, Pepper sighed. “I’ll have Friday send you the list of accepted disciplinary measures. Those of us without super- strength mostly just smack him, but the squirt gun might work for you.”

“As you will have it,” Loki said to the ground, and then pulled himself back upright. There was, Bruce noted, a bright red handprint blooming on his jawline – the flesh looked burned, rather than bruised, and Bruce winced in sympathy.

Tony chuckled. “And you apologized to the correct person. You would be amazed at how many people get that one wrong.” He blinked. “Hey, Pep?”

“Tony?”

“How’d you know it wasn’t me?”

“No tongue,” she answered briskly, “among other things. Did you still want to talk us through the new suit features? Might give everyone a chance to cool off.”

There was an awkward, blinking silence as everyone present ran, probably, the same internal calculus of _Tony is annoying and will make things worse_ vs. _These are the people I have to work with to save the world this time._

Well, everyone except the Leewit, who piped up “sure!” immediately, and plopped down onto the gravel path and gazed up at him with her clasped hands under her chin.

The adults all smiled a little helplessly. Bruce imagined that if Steve had been there he'd have said something about moxie. Which was there, sure. Being the paranoid old bastard that he was, Bruce wondered how deep the kid's goals went. Diffuse the tension, sure. And then? The Leewit had made no bones about her own detachment from the current crisis. Whatever was about to happen with the Titan already _had,_ from her point of view. Whether the people she knew were descended from the people who had successfully defended themselves from the Titan or from the scraps and remnants who had somehow survived the terrible aftermath of their defeat, all that made no difference to her. About the only entity she cared about enough to negotiate with was “Big Bossy,” the “vatch,” whom no one else (except, possibly, Loki) could even see, and Bruce had the feeling that relationship was more like an armed detente than a partnership. Given all that, her happy-go-lucky demeanor and shallow attention span made sense… but Bruce had spent too much time around Natasha to believe that making sense meant his hypothesis was correct.

Tony had used up most of his current burst of energy on the confrontation with Loki. His response to the Leewit's clowning was to blink hard, cast one last reassuring glance at Pepper, and clear his throat. “Well. OK. So. You've all had a preview; let me take you through the specifics.” He tapped the arc reactor and moved his arms in the gesture Bruce remembered as the “stand down” signal for every iteration of Iron Man since Mk. 50 or so. Bruce expected the pieces to fly off and compress themselves into a suitcase, but they didn't. The metal… flowed, almost like mercury, dividing itself into veinlike streams that retreated back under Tony's clothes and into… well, up to now Bruce had thought it was a hoodie with kevlar panels. Bruce whistled appreciatively.

Tony kept talking as the suit did its thing. “So as you have probably guessed, the major advantages of this model, beside the whole awesome factor, because, come on, are flexibility and responsiveness. When it's in standby mode, it's even more compact and harder to steal than the implant models, and the interface is damn near telepathic. In a combat situation, it can self-heal and even reconfigure itself on the fly to deal with a specific threat. It’s got the design specs for every device I’ve included in every model up to this point and can pull up whichever ones I need. For the ones like Hulkbuster that take sheer mass, well, still SOL for those, but it can plug in just fine for working in tandem with them.”

As Tony slipped into lecture mode, he relaxed, his eyes sparkling and his gestures growing more expansive. Bruce, playing along, widened his eyes a little, and asked in a high, faux-breathy tone, “And how does it do all that, professor?”

Tony snorted. “Oh, screw you,” he laughed. “But I’ll tell you: nanotech. Started with Dr. Cho’s stuff and the things we learned dealing with Extremis, only instead of trying to get the nanites to work with an organic matrix they– ”

Bruce would never be able to describe the sound. It pulsed, growing louder and louder, and made his brain fizz and his knees feel watery for a moment. He’d swear he felt something whizz past his head from behind. Tony staggered as if he’d taken a swat from the Other Guy. And speaking of which… 

“Easy,” Bruce whispered to himself, “let’s… let’s take a moment to read the ground,” but he could feel the Hulk starting to spread through his veins like poison as he backed away from his little crowd of teammates. If Hulk hurt Pepper…. Well, he wouldn’t have to worry about the end of the world any more if that happened, so there was that. “Easy...”

The Leewit screamed.


	21. Loki Makes Himself Useful

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of significant spoilers for _The Wizard of Karres_ here, but I don't think it's enough to ruin anybody's fun. The suspense in the Karres books tends to be much less "Who's behind the plot?" and much more, "How we gonna get out of this one?"

Everything went still for just long enough for jangled nerves and startled brains to contact each other. Rhodey, Loki, and Vision took fighting stances and flicked their eyes around the grounds, looking for the threat. Dum-E rolled up to the hangar door and waved the fire extinguisher. Pepper’s hands glowed. Tony had ended up on the ground. His fingers danced across the suit housing, alerting the pack of nanites within, and straightened his shoulders as Iron Man formed up around him.

The Leewit, her sharp face turned into a snarling mask of fear and rage, ran right over the top of him, her foot hit his midriff as she sped past. And she didn’t stop yelling. “You dope! You clumping stupid, stupid, _DOPE!”_

She’s made it to entrance of the hangar before Tony could even say, “hey.” Buy the time he’d sat up, she’d vaulted off Dum-E’s housing and gone skittering up the support struts.

The Hulk complained in Bruce’s head: “LOUD.” But – and this was new – the view only flashed green for a second or two, and then returned to normal – as if the Hulk had taken a quick look around and then retreated. On one hand, that was encouraging. On the other, what even? Why now? 

Tony and Vision both skimmed back into the building after the Leewit. Loki watched with an assessing expression, and Rhodes with a worried one. After a moment, Tony’s old friend sighed. “Yup, it was just about time for one of our teammates to completely stop making sense, wasn’t it? Whatcha got, Viz?” he called into the hangar.

Before the android could reply, another whistle made everyone outside the hangar wince and both the airborne members of the team wobble in mid-flight. “Don’t you touch me!” the Leewit yowled from some invisible point under the roof.

Tony recovered and scooted backward, his voice crackling through the mask. “OK, OK, not touching. Jesus, kid.”

Loki, measured, calm, and irrelevant, observed, “I find I must reassess my initial estimation of the Leewit’s abilities. It appears she is entirely capable of carrying out the threat she issued the other day in young Parker’s apartment, given sufficient lead time.”

Friday’s voice chimed over the speakers, inappropriately chirpy. “You look like you’re in a bit of a stew, Your Wisdom. Should my bro here take you to your rooms? I can have some tea waiting.”

Vision chimed in, “Indeed, Leewit, though I know you are agile, I am greatly concerned about your maintaining your balance on that strut while you remain in that position, and you are exhibiting multiple symptoms consistent with a panic attack.” Dummy, still in the doorway, cheeped in what might have been agreement.

Loki was the first, of the four who remained outside, to move toward the new field of action. He oozed past Dum-E, with Bruce, Rhodes, and Pepper following behind and pausing in the bay doors. From this angle, the Leewit was visible as an improbably small lump on the very highest of the roof supports, and not one of the horizontal supports, either. Vision hovered some ten feet below her, ready to catch her if she fell. Tony had landed and retracted the faceplate, the better to pace and fidget, from the looks of it. His eyes fell on Pepper and his face went pleading.

“Can you… help me fix this, Pep? I mean, I am shit with upset women. You know this. I have no fucking idea what set her off, or… I mean, obviously we have to get her calmed down and… I dunno, a bath? That lavender stuff you… uh...”

“The Leewit dislikes baths,” Friday advised, still over the intercom.

Pepper cleared her throat. “Jim,” she said, “does this lab have a Nap Cache?”

“It damn well better,” Rhodes answered, and Dum-E waved its fire extinguisher cheerfully and zoomed toward one of the cabinets. “Oh, OK, there ya go. Tones. Tony! Stop muttering and go get a blanket out of the Nap Cache.”

“Not Tony!” shrieked the Leewit, on high.

“What the hell did _I_ do to you, kid?”

Loki sighed loudly and strode to the newly open cupboard, where Dum-E had pulled out a bulky rolled-up sheet of vinyl that might have been an inflatable mattress and was waving it around.

“That is not a blanket, golem.” Loki advised, and reached past the robot to pull out the requested item, a bright red bundle of polar fleece. “Here,” he called up to the waiting Vision, “Catch!” 

Loki’s strength might not have been equal to Thor’s, but it was more than equal to the task of launching a bundle of fabric some twenty yards or so. Vision caught the blanket as easily as Loki had thrown it, shook it open, and then floated up to the narrow bar of metal where the Leewit still clung. “Breathe, your Wisdom,” Vision suggested, and then whatever he said after that was too quiet to be heard at ground level. But the Leewit must have been willing to let go, eventually, because Vision wrapped her in the blanket and cradled her up against his chest, then floated back in a gentle incline toward the bay doors. “I’ll take her to her rooms,” he informed the rest of his audience.

Tony watched them go and sighed. He squeezed Pepper with one arm as soon as she came within reach. “That could’ve gone better,” he groused. “Still not as bad as Vanko at the expo, though.”

Pepper and Rhodey nodded agreement and Tony let himself whine. “Seriously, what is up with that kid? She was completely unfazed by time travel, a riot in Central Park with sentient goop, and fucking Loki showing up in Peter’s bedroom. No offense, Loki. Loki? Is he still here? Anyway – all that but my nanites send her into meltdown? Am I some kind of legendary villain in the future? What the fuck, am I fucking Dr. Frankenstein?”

“Whoa, Tones, slow down.” And Rhodey was there, patting his shoulder.

“You saw it, Platypus. It was definitely the mention of nanites that set her off.”

“So that means nanites are evil? You think showers are evil, too? ‘Cause those used to set you off, remember.”

“What?” Tony lifted his head enough to glare.

“Tony,” Rhodey leaned back against Dum-E’s carapace, trying to rest his knees. “In our conversations so far,” he pointed out, “the Leewit has mentioned ‘that time I was on the imperial slave ship,’ ‘that time the Prime Minister of Nartheby wanted to have us executed,’ ‘that time we had to hijack a pirate ship,’ and ‘one of the dopes who tried to kidnap and torture us to find out about the Sheewash drive.’ She talked about them like these were _normal_ childhood adventures. You think maybe she might have an irrational trigger or two?”

Tony’s breathing slowed down a little. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, OK. I do reserve the right to say ‘told you so’ later when it turns out I’ve done something horrible, but… OK.”

^^^^^^^^

Leaving the mortals to their hapless flapping, Loki materialized abruptly in the Leewit’s room, next to the armchair in which she had knotted herself. The resulting burst of _seidr_ (or klatha) and puff of displaced air garnered no response in the tiny witch, who remained huddled and trembling under the blanket Vision had draped her with, making distressed chirping noises that suggested a complete abdication of rational thought. Loki produced another burst of _seidr,_ direct to the girl’s nerves – something like a zap of static. This caused her to snap her head upright enough to glare at him through red-rimmed gray eyes. “Don’t touch me,” she growled.

Loki sniffed. “You are panicking. This is unlike you.” Not that he really had much basis to judge, but accuracy was not his primary concern at the moment.

The Leewit took a breath that sounded much too much like a sob. “Easy for you to say,” she hissed. “You won’t live long enough to see what this is going to do. You haven’t just been exposed to a plague that’s had it in for you and your people for a zillion years, and you don’t have to think about being cut off from all your people forever and ever.”

Loki took a moment to collect himself. “I do not recommend that you make assumptions about my lifespan, my people, nor the enmities and risks pertaining thereto,” he told the Leewit, coldly. She snorted quietly and probably rolled her eyes, though she had dropped her face back atop her drawn-up knees and it was hard to tell. “What plague?” he asked.

“ _The nanites._ ” The Leewit’s voice came out in a whisper and she hugged her knees tighter, partly in fear but largely in shame. She had been so sure, so _sure_ that she was going to be able to come back home as soon as she got this mess on Old Yarthe figured out. And instead she was going to be the reason the plague knew enough about Karres witches to start hunting them.

^^^^^^^^^

A zombie apocalypse, was what Loki gathered from the Leewit’s tearful, shaky explanations, but a targetable one: one that could and did select its targets for maximum impact at the macro-level. A colony of nanites could successfully operate its sentient host like a puppet, convincingly enough to pass unnoticed in company. They had an easier time of it, certainly, if they did not have to fool family or close acquaintances, so the chosen targets were generally people newly come to the centers of power from its outskirts – people respected enough in their home territory to have access and influence in their new, higher echelons. In these positions they sowed conflict and paranoia and chaos, weakening the leadership structures and gradually taking over other newcomers, reaching outward in increasing circles of trust as the concentrations of the infected grew high enough, until the whole planet fell under their sway and they no longer had to trouble themselves with pretending to be people. 

If a cluster of nanites found themselves without a host worth the taking over, they went semi-dormant, maintaining nearly undetectable colonies within a single hair follicle, or in a common food store if they found one, until they hit on just the right victim. Individual carriers could, sometimes, be identified – the Leewit wouldn’t say how – but pretty much the only way to be sure the smaller, dormant, colonies were gone was fire: whole planets had been rendered uninhabitable, trying to burn the nanites out of the topsoil.

There was “klatha” in it somewhere, the Leewit’s people knew, not only because there would have to be, for a collection of beings the size of viruses to organize themselves well enough to gather the kind of information the plague was known to make use of, but because it had been verified. They also knew there had to be, or have been, some kind of puppet master behind the plague, to give it such an elaborate methodology in the first place. No one knew whether the puppet master was still a going concern or not, but the nanite plague had all but destroyed the sentient population of the galaxy at least once some thousands of years before the Leewit had been born, and had been making another attempt in the time the Leewit had left to come to Midgard.

It was a sickening vision, and an insidious one; Loki had no sooner dismissed the possibility of Thanos being the puppet master behind the plague (it was too subtle for him) than he began to wonder about whether Odin, or some of his advisors, had been among its victims. No. Not Odin, whose mind was too labyrinthine for the kinds of tactics the Leewit described, and not Thor, who had been under watch of one sort or another since babyhood and had never (alas) changed significantly in all that time. And any of the courtiers who would have made good nanite targets had burned with Asgard, or with the refugee ship. And all of that was assuming the nanites were not, as the Leewit seemed to believe at the moment, an accidental creation of Stark’s.

Loki straightened up from the chair he’d draped himself over during the Leewit’s recitation. “So,” he said briskly, “your concern is that these miniature golems of Stark’s are, or will become, the plague in question, yes?” At the Leewit’s impatient nod, he continued. “If so, then said creation was accidental, as clearly Stark has no intention of doing any such thing. Would you agree? In order to be a danger _now,_ they would have to have some intentions of their own, which they are keeping secret from their creator.”

The Leewit wrinkled her brow in a way that reminded Loki, for a bittersweet moment, of his brother. But unlike his brother, the Leewit showed no hint of anger at having been out-thought. “I guess so,” she admitted.

“In that case,” Loki concluded, “a few simple tests will establish whether we have anything to fear from them; at least for the short term. If Stark’s nanites use no _seidr,_ they are not yet _the_ nanites, whatever they may someday become. Likewise, if they cannot be detected outside the housing Stark keeps them in when they are not in use, then we needn’t worry about what they will become in contact with anyone else.”

The Leewit wrinkled her nose. “You sure those are _simple_ tests? Even the Nartheby Sprites have to use grik-dogs to sniff out nanites, and they’ve been using klatha forever.”

Loki bridled for a moment at this implied aspersion on his skill, too much like the automatic dismissal of the warriors, of all those who assumed that because he was not a woman, or not Vanir, or not some other thing, he could not do what he said he could. But in the next moment he heard the rest of the Leewit’s question and grinned hard enough to make his burned face prickle. More intelligent questions! Not “can _you_ do this?” but “Is this possible?”

He let his face grow serious again. “These Sprites of yours had access to plague nanites only via the infected, correct? They had to learn how to identify them when enmeshed in other bodies, among other substances. _We,_ however, can know that our sample contains nanites and nothing else. It simplifies the matter enormously.”

The Leewit did not so much sag in relief as expand. Her arms unlocked from her bent knees and all the involved limbs sprang outward before flopping themselves over the edges of the chair, rather like the coiled paper ribbons in those peculiar toys called “party poppers” that Barton had had a penchant for.

“Oh, yes!” She cried, mannerisms gone big-eyed and childish again, “Please do that.” She pouted a little and her eyelids fluttered… flirtatiously? “I could...” and the eyelids dropped in what might have been genuine shyness, “I could maybe heal that burn for you, to pay you back?” She dropped the little-girl act abruptly. “How’d you get that, anyway? Looks _nasty!”_

Loki shrugged. “I already owe you a boon,” he said, “so you needn’t concern yourself with payment, particularly as the concerns you aired should be addressed regardless. And Lady Potts burned me after I kissed her, earlier. I rather deserved it, and it will heal on its own.”

“How’d she do that?”

“It seems that she, too, has abilities outside the common for her species. Shall we rejoin the others and make our tests?”

^^^^^^^

To save time and repetition, Loki had Friday convey a summary of his conversation with the Leewit to the others while she disappeared into the washroom to bathe her face, comb her hair, and otherwise restore her dignity, and Loki made his way to meet them in the common room.

Their reactions began with predictable dismayed sympathy, followed by other predictable things.

Stark, though he paled at the initial nightmare visions, was indignant. “What the hell, she thinks I’d ignore basic safety precautions?” (Banner and Rhodes cleared their throats noisily) “Seriously. The gray goo problem is not exactly new, although the zombies are a nice (and horrible) touch, and believe me: _nobody_ who works with nanotech is going to not take measures to keep it under control. Not even evil guys. The patent issues alone….”

“We may want to keep the possibility in mind when we examine AIM data, however,” Vision mused, and everyone except Loki winced.

Rhodes tried to be practical. “How sure is she that this thing is of Terran origin?”

“I’m not,” the Leewit grumbled from the TV screen. She had finished her wash-up but was refusing to come out of her room again until Loki did his tests. “I’m not even real sure I’m in the right time period for it to be a problem. Pre-diaspora history is not exactly my best thing! Or anyone’s best thing, except for a few stuffy old professors in the Academia Moonbelt.”

“The aca…. Never mind. Not touching that one. The point is, Leewit, my suit nanites are not a zombie virus, OK? I can show you all the...”

“Stark,” Loki interrupted, “Would a review of the design specifications persuade you to utilize SHIELD-made anti-espionage devices?”

Tony sputtered briefly, then rolled his eyes. “And she trusts you instead of the guy she’s worked with for weeks? Not cool.”

Loki looked down his nose at the inventor. “She understands enough of my powers to be able to evaluate my work. And she knows I am in her debt.”

Stark threw his hands in the air. “Fine! Fine. Do your tests or whatever and tell her ‘Wisdom’ to join us for lunch.”

Banner looked up from his place on the sofa “We’re not sure that the… the plague nanites are… not a thing, though?”

“Et tu, Brucie? No, strictly speaking we’re not sure, but...”

Banner wrung his hands. “Because that… I’m wondering now if… Are we sure _Ross_ is himself?”

The silence at _that_ lasted long enough for Loki to pull four glass tumblers out of one of the kitchen cupboards and arrange them on the coffee table, along with a small dish and what might have been a brush and inkstone that he pulled from his pockets. Or somewhere. Everyone could see the sense of Banner’s worry: influential person in a new sphere, sowing discord and paranoia, and a “change of outlook” after a “coronary incident” would make a pretty good cover story for an alien mind-control virus trying to get the hang of a new puppet. 

But in the next moment, everyone shook their heads.

“Pretty sure he’s still the same greedy, narrow-minded blowhard we all know and … avoid,” Rhodes said. “He’s allocating his time differently, but his social circle really hasn’t changed all that much.”

“I’ve hacked his medical records,” Stark added, and then raised his voice over Rhodes’ and Potts’ indignation, “The heart team he’s got is all legit, and I’ve got to think being taken over by a hive mind would show up on the CT scans somehow.”

“Timing doesn’t work,” the Leewit announced on the screen. “Pre-diaspora Yarthe was too much of a backwater for the nanites to bother with, even for sleeper colonies. Asgard, maybe, but so far their known targets have been among peoples who have power networks in multiple star systems, so even Asgard might be kind of small for ‘em.”

Loki blinked once, slowly, and Banner blinked several times, rapidly. Pepper, for some reason, hid a smile behind her hand.

“A lot of the early human colonies were on planets that lost their indigenous populations to the nanites, in fact,” the Leewit continued, “so thinking it started here makes some sense, but if they were taking over on Old Yarthe there wouldn’t have been enough of us left to be fighting them in my time.”

“Oh....” Banner still sounded uncertain, but he didn’t push the matter further. “Well, OK, I guess...”

Stark patted him on the shoulder. “Y’know what? Let’s throw SHIELD a bone and send them this whole mess. They’ve had to deal with doppelgangers before and they’re…not _horrible_ at long-term threat assessment. We’ll pass on the nanite plague in all its vague glory as our hot time-traveler intel and maybe they’ll think we’re cooperating and be more helpful about our immediate problem. Or at least stay out of our hair.”

Loki cleared his throat. “Speaking of immediate problems…”

Stark snapped his mouth shut, took a very visible deep breath, and turned toward his least welcome guest. “Right. You need me to click my heels three times or anything?”

Loki produced another little bowl, one that would hold a quarter-cup or so, from wherever he’d pulled the ink set from. “If you could kindly induce some of your miniature golems to settle in this for a time. A volume equal to one mole would be ideal; if that is too large to fit the vessel, then a ninth part of a mole, or a twenty-fourth.”

“Did he just say – a mole like Avegadro’s constant, that mole?”

“I did indeed, Cl. Rhodes. Do try to keep up. Stark? Your sample?” 

Tony held up a finger, looking pained. “Give a guy a moment, Mr. Mistoffelees, this is not exactly one of my auto-preset configurations.”

Loki simply inclined his head and held out the bowl, while Stark, eyes half shut, mumbled indistinctly to himself, then brought his hand slowly to the glowing casket on his chest, finger still extended. He brought it away a few moments later, shining as though painted in mercury, and held it over Loki’s bowl, where the silvery stuff coalesced into a blob and rolled down to sit in a puddle at the bottom.

“Thank you, Stark,” Loki said, and got to work.

For the non-magicians in the room, the next half hour was both strange and dull. Loki flitted about briskly, painting invisible patterns on the coffee table, pouring smokey substances into the tumblers he’d borrowed and setting them on various pieces of furniture at the outer edges of the room, calling up lights on his hands, and in the center of something that could only be called a crystal ball, frowning at them, dismissing them again. After the first ten minutes, he announced, “The suit nanites do not employ or generate any seidr of their own, and they are unable to maintain any sustained action out of contact with their master.”

“Could’ve told you that,” Stark muttered resentfully, but the Leewit’s relief was visible even through the imperfect medium of the video screen. 

“Now,” Loki said, and then didn’t say anything else for some little time. He knelt by the coffee table and placed his hands around, but not touching, the crystal ball. The air grew smokier than should have been feasible with Friday running the HVAC system. Pale green pulsed away from the ball in visible rings- or rather, bubbles, a three-dimensional doppler effect. Loki stood back and frowned into the middle distance, watching the intangible spheres.

“There are no significant quantities of nanites anywhere outside the activation pod, and the bodies of Stark and the Lady Potts,” Loki said after the sixteenth glowing bubble had hit the invisible edges of the cell and shattered into nothing. His tone of voice was detached, as though he were reading the information off a teleprompter, but Banner startled, and the Leewit’s image glowered. “Those in Stark’s system are identical in structure to those in the pod, in quantities consistent with accidental ingestion, or perhaps they are deliberately embedded contact points. The ones that inhabit the Lady Potts are akin to Stark's, but markedly different, and appear to be thoroughly integrated with her nervous system, though not in her frontal cortex. The overall effect implies that she has been infected with a mutated strain, but she does not appear to contagious by casual contact.”

The Leewit's feed cut off abruptly. Everyone in the room began to speak at once, and stopped, which let Friday chime in. “Her Wisdom can hear us,” she announced. “Just didn't want to try transmitting that whistle she was about to start up.”

“Fair enough,” Banner croaked, and then he turned to glare Stark. “Tell me,” he began, and there was an edge of Hulk growl in his voice, “You did not manage to create a new STD while working on your suit, Tony.”

“No!” Stark's hands flew upward. “No, I swear – no, Pep wasn't – I know I told you about this already. Extremis, remember?”

The lady herself patted Banner's shoulder, soothingly. “Loki mistook the order of causation, Bruce. Some of the base code for the suit nanites is based on what Tony put together while stabilizing the Extremis virus. That's what makes them 'akin.' Nobody accidentally infected anybody.”

“Oh.” Bruce sagged. “Oh. Right. Sorry.”

“This is what you get for falling asleep when I try to tell you important shit,” Stark groused, and then tilted his head toward the nearest camera pickup. “You get all that, kid? Nobody is contagious, nobody's tech is taking over their brain, we don't have any magic-using robots except maybe Viz, and that one's debatable. Are you OK to calm the hell down and have lunch with us yet?”

The Leewit's face re-emerged on the main viewscreen, scowling. “You sure it's safe, Loki?” she hedged, and Stark made a noise like a wounded bilgesnipe.

“If by, 'it,' you mean joining us for luncheon,” Loki said, sounding bored, “I believe it to be no riskier than any of the other tasks you have undertaken in your time here. We may all, at any moment, be reduced to our component atoms by the Titan or his minions, but sulking in your chambers will not render you any safer.”

As he lectured, the godling swept around the room, gathering the accoutrements of his spell and redistributing them. The crystal ball, the inkstone and its tray, and a few bits and pieces vanished as Loki picked them up. The smoke in the room funneled down into the glass tumblers and then swirled down through the bottoms of them into nothing at all, while the cups themselves went, prosaically enough, into the dishwasher. As the Leewit's footsteps sounded in the hall, Loki plucked up the bowl that contained the nanite sample and walked back to Stark, holding it up. “I presume you want these back.”

Stark rubbed his forehead, looking exhausted. “Yeah.”


	22. The Leewit Makes Herself Useful.

Lunch was a subdued affair. The Leewit edged into the room with about triple her usual caution, then just stood there glaring for a moment. Finally, she announced, “sorry for making such a dumb clumping fuss,” in a tone that sounded more resentful than apologetic, then stared at the floor.

Vision nodded stiffly in return. “As your reaction did not appear to be voluntary, I do not believe your apology was necessary, though it is, of course, accepted.” With that, he swept through the kitchen island and began pulling condiments, packages of meat and cheese, and other sundries from the refrigerator and arranging them on the counter.

The Leewit stiffened further when she heard the word “voluntary,” going from sulky awkwardness to something more like true offense. Rhodey decided to jump in before she said something that made it worse. “Honestly, kid? I for one am kind of relieved to know there are some things that scare you.” When she looked up at him, he smiled a little and raised an eyebrow. “Y'know, I still haven't had my hug today.”

The Leewit all but tumbled into his lap. The strength of her embrace, together with the sparks of klatha she had to be sending up his spine, made Rhodey grunt, but all he said was, “There ya go, kid,” and he patted her a couple times between the shoulder blades.

Tony pretended to be jealous. “Rhodey gets hugs? Since when does Rhodey get hugs? I feel like I should have been consulted on this development.” But Pepper, smiling, dragged him away to the kitchen island to construct a sandwich for himself. The others followed. Loki held back a moment or two, poking about until he'd located a knife and fork and one of the larger dinner plates, which he then piled with about half a head of lettuce and samples of almost everything else on the counter, rather in the manner of a chef salad. The Leewit, who usually gravitated toward ham and cheese, instead chose a combination of ingredients of Dum-E like randomness: Hummus, egg slices, red onions, olives, and sprouts, all on a raisin bagel. And for the first time ever in Rhodey's acquaintance with her, the Leewit did not add any potato chips or sweets to her plate.

It wasn't until everyone had sat down and the Leewit declined an offer to have her water glass filled from the pitcher on the table that he realized that the Leewit had assembled her meal entirely from the options on the counter that neither Tony nor Pepper had touched, even at the remove of a serving utensil. He was still trying to decide whether to say anything about that, (and if so, what, and when) when Loki made a painful hissing noise and Pepper gasped.

“Oh, no! Loki, I'm so sorry. How badly did I burn you?”

Bruce sat up straighter in his chair. Nearly everyone's eyes went to their most problematic guest.

Loki kept his eyes fixed on his plate, his hands moving a little more rapidly than a human's would to cut his salad into absurdly small bites. He conveyed these to his mouth steadily and seemed to swallow most of them without chewing them much. “I assaulted you, Lady Potts,” he said flatly, without moving his jaw more than he could help. “You are blameless in this matter, and I will heal in good time.”

Rhodey thought the guy had a point, honestly. He'd be the first to admit to having more than a little schadenfreude earlier, seeing Mister Badass So-Called God go through his magic routine sporting a bright red mark on his face from the Actually Divine Ms. Potts. All the same, though… 

Now they could see it close up, it looked bad. The redness wasn't skin, it was a creased, shiny scab, crusty yellow at its cracked edges and with a sticky gleam here and there where some kind of fluid was seeping out. He sucked air through his teeth. There was poetic justice and then there was… stuff that was just wrong. And if _he_ felt like that, what about Pepper?

The CEO of Stark Industries was trembling. “I worked on this,” she grated. “I made sure I could keep the temperature under control, even when I was acting on instinct! It's sup- supposed to be automatic!

“And calibrated to human tolerances, yes?” Loki glanced up briefly, then took another three tiny bites of his huge salad. “While Frost Giants are superior to the people of Midgard in nearly every physical respect, tolerance of high temperatures does not happen to be one of our stronger points. I will still heal.”

“He already turned me down when I offered to fix him before,” the Leewit groused. “Sanctimonious dope.”

Loki twisted in his chair, his expression gone bug-eyed. “Sanctimonious?” he choked, “Me? Loki lie-smith and kinslayer? You think me sanctimonious?” The rant might have continued further, had he not managed to crack his scab again. Loki sank back into his chair with a grimace and a whimpered, “Ow.”

The Leewit smirked. “You're letting yourself hurt because of some stupid honor thing, aren't you? And sticking to it after Pepper's made it clear she'd rather you didn't. What would _you_ call it?”

“I really would be more comfortable if you'd at least put an ice pack on that,” Pepper added, still sounding anxious but no longer panicking.

“Me, too,” Tony said unexpectedly. At Loki's surprised look he went on, “Oh, don't get me wrong, it isn't because I don't think you deserve what she dished out. If we didn't have another apocalypse breathing down our necks I'd tell her to give you a matching one on your ass and post the pictures on Instagram.”

Loki pressed his lips together. Tony shrugged elaborately and downed half a glass of water. “But we do have to be on high alert,” he went on, “and I know exactly how much pain you have to be in right now and exactly how much that's fucking with your head. And we can't afford it. Long as it's my planet at stake, my allies gotta be functional.”

Loki inclined his head in acknowledgment, and went back to eating.

Bruce shifted in his chair. “I'll grab an ice pack,” but the Leewit was already up out of her seat.

“Nah,” she said, “I got it.” Only, she didn't pull a square of blue gel from the freezer; she pulled a bottle of orange Gatorade from the fridge, and had it open and the first third consumed by the time she got back to the table. “Might go faster if I can borrow from you, if you're up for it.”

“Of course!” Loki sounded surprised. “I wished to observe your working anyway; if we are to collaborate.”

“Kay,” the Leewit said absently, setting her Gatorade bottle down next to Loki's plate, but Tony interrupted.

“Hey! Whoa whoa whoa. Tinkerbell heals? How am I just hearing about this now? You been holding out on us? Not cool!”

“You didn't ask,” the Leewit said, at the same time as Rhodey said, “Need to know, Tones.”

Tony jumped up from his seat to lean over his friend. “You thought I didn't need to know?”

Rhodey spread his hands placatingly. “I found out about it right after that shitshow at Bergdorf's. I figured _Ross_ didn't need to know, 'specially when I found out how tight her limits are.” At Tony's glare, he added, “Plus, she bribed me.”

“Bribed? You?” Pepper's mouth hung open.

Rhodey twisted his mouth a little. “She tells me I'm _this_ close to being able to wiggle my toes again.” At the various mms and ahs of understanding, he waggled a hand. “And from what she said at the time, she couldn't do much without a partner, which she didn't have.”

“Until now,” Tony said, turning his gaze back to their two magicians.

“Uh-huh.”

The Leewit stood behind Loki's chair, looking at the top of his head, right hand on his shoulder and left cupped down so the fingers hovered near, but did not touch, the burn scab. Her patient had stopped trying to eat and was sitting up a little straighter for ease of access, and they wore identical neutral expressions that suggested neither had any spare brain power for directing their faces to do things at the moment.

Based on their previous experiences with magicians like Dr. Strange and the Scarlet Witch, most of the room watched with vague expectations of dancing lights and mystical gestures. Nothing like that happened. After a couple of moments Loki's fingers twitched and he pulled his head back a little. “Norns and serpents, child!” he fretted, “Your channel buffers are absurd; no wonder your spells take so much power. Let me.”

“ 'Kay,” the Leewit said serenely, and a moment later her eyes flew open. “Oh, wow, that's neat! I sure hope you can teach me to do that one.”

“We shall see.”

And then they were silent again for a few moments. “Oops,” said the Leewit, “that was your tongue, sorry. Not used to doing this on someone who doesn't have bones and I went too deep.”

Everyone else blinked at this, including Loki. “I beg your pardon?”

“What for?” the Leewit asked absently, “OK, there we are. This might be a little itchy.”

“I am fairly certain that I have bones, child.” Loki rolled his eyes, trying to look at the Leewit behind him without moving his head.

“Nope!” The Leewit grinned,“Not really! I mean, you've got stuff _like_ bones, and it's dense as human bone, which isn't all that much relative to the rest of you, but it's more like cartilage. Kinda bendy. No wonder you’re so clumping good as a shapeshifter.”

Bruce's eyes grew unfocussed. “That could actually be very adaptive,” he mused, “for a species that evolved in temperatures too cold for much liquid water… and then...” he shook himself. “Well, I doubt we'll have time to look into it any time soon.”

“Hush up,” the Leewit snapped, and her face went absent again. There were still no lights or gestures, but the sticky scarlet hand print on Loki's jaw grew dry and brown, the flesh around its edges paling to Loki's normal tones. The Leewit pulled her hands away, rolled her shoulders and cracked her knuckles. “That oughta do it,” she said. “Sure is a lot easier to work healing on someone who heals faster than standard human already, even without that help with the channel buffers.”

Loki rubbed a hand across the scab. Most of it flaked away into dust, leaving a faint pink shadow behind. “Nevertheless,” he said, “I thank you.”

“Don't suppose you'd be willing to help me out with Rhodey's stuff, next time?” The Leewit fluttered her eyelashes. “Dunno how much extra power we could feed into it at a time, but it's gotta help.”

“We shall see,” Loki said again, and this time around his tone of voice sounded a lot more like “No.” He scooted his chair a little and went back to devouring his food, in much larger bites than previously.

Bruce gaped. “You can repair old nerve damage? Just what else can you do, Leewit? What's the worst injury you've ever healed?”

The Leewit sucked down the rest of her Gatorade and then said “slavery.”

“Er.” Bruce tried to think of a way to rephrase the question so that the answer wouldn't still be _slavery_ and couldn't come up with one.

“It wasn't a real acute case or anything,” the Leewit told him earnestly. “The cannibals were saving him for a special occasion and otherwise mostly left him alone.” She sprang up and fetched a second helping from the counter, still avoiding anything that Tony or Pepper had touched.

“Space cannibals,” Rhodey muttered to himself, while Tony started to ask, “An acute case of slavery would be...” and then went pale and finished, “never mind.”

“Interesting to know the disease model for social troubles survives into the Leewit’s time,” Pepper mused. “Slavery is illegal in the United States, but even here you could argue that it exists on near pandemic levels.”

Everyone shifted uncomfortably. Loki took another three bites of salad. Tony and Vision both opened their mouths, one to change the subject and the other to continue it. Neither of them got a chance to say anything.

A whirl of sparks shot from the wall next to the TV, irising out into a dark hole that grew until it was big enough to admit a frantic-looking man in the maroon and gold uniform of Kamar Taj. “Good!” he cried, “You are all here! Bleecker Street! Now! They have come for Strange!”


	23. Who Invited THESE Dopes?

“Two Horsemen,” the acolyte snapped out, “Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian. Close to the park.”

Pepper reached for her phone but Tony grabbed her first and kissed her, hard. “Love you,” he croaked, before tapping the nanite housing and armoring up again. “Rhodey, you’re with Viz and the Leewit,” her announced, and waved toward the portal. “C’mon, Green meanies, chop-chop!”

Bruce sighed and shambled briskly after Tony while Loki and Rhodes summoned up their respective armors. The Leewit flattened herself on the floor to duck the incoming pieces of War Machine while Loki frowned, narrow-eyed, and flicked a hand at himself, until his skin darkened to the color of the table’s wood, and his green leather seemed to melt into the semblance of robes like the acolyte’s. He smiled his sharpest smile and pulled his favorite daggers out from behind the ersatz folds of cloth before he, too, strode through the portal.

The acolyte extended his other hand, grunted with effort, and opened a second portal in the middle of the kitchen island. “They know you are coming,” he informed the three remaining teammates.

“Copy,” Rhodes called over the hum of the repulsors as they warmed up. Vision simply nodded and floated through the second portal without comment. The Leewit, having scrambled to her feet, planted them, flexed her knees a moment, and then took off sprinting. Toward the first portal.

“Wait!” the doorkeeper shouted, “No!” But holding the two portals open left him with no maneuvering room to try and stop the Leewit, and Rhodes merely rolled his eyes.

“Don’t kick yourself too hard, she’s a handful,” he advised, and dove after Vision through the second portal to their backup in … a place that started with W.

Only Pepper was left in the nearly silent common room. Pepper stood ramrod straight and nodded, jaw clenched, at the magician. “Kick alien ass,” she told him, and turned away before he could see her blink. The man snorted in frustration, but closed the second portal and jumped back through his original one, ready to rejoin the fray.

^^^^^^^

Loki knew perfectly well he was being stupid and querulous, but some part of him railed at the Norns, even as he snaked among the combatants on this newest battlefield. _Why?_ Some part of him whimpered as he ducked under a newly forming portal from one of the genuine Kamar Taji, why must it always come down to arming oneself – to proving whose brutes were the most brutal? He had had _done_ with battles, had sat scheming on a throne, had knelt humbly at the feet of a mentor whose age and guile made Odin seem a mere babe in arms, and _still_ his life hung on the points of his precious uru-metal daggers. _Still_ he had to spin doubles out of light and send them skirmishing. It was – it was _stale!_ In fact, had his life not been at stake it would have been downright boring.

Stark and Strange looped about each other in the air, dodging flying debris as they tried to close with Ebony Maw. “I told you,” Strange grunted as he burst a wayward traffic light into shards before it could hit him, “that Earth is closed today!”

“Oooh, damn, I wish I'd been the one to say that; that is a terrific line!” Stark chirped in reply. He shot a beam at Cull Obsidian, who blocked it with a motorcycle he'd picked up off the street.

“Have either of you called the little one Squidward yet? Because – Ow!”

The newcomer dangled from a pale line of something like silk, rubbing their head and looking a bit dizzy, though not as badly so as Loki would expect from a baseline human who had just collided with a mobile billboard. Stark’s voice crackled out from his helmet as he zipped upward to start another attack dive: “I can’t even with you, kid. Get out of here!”

Loki had not recognized the slim figure in its flamboyantly colored guise, but its answering shout of, “Don't be a dope, Mr. Stark!” made him blink a little. It couldn't be the Leewit – the shoulder-to-hip ratio was all wrong, and besides, wasn't she meant to go with the others? – but clearly the youth was known to her. Did he recognize that voice? He yanked pre-emptively on a Kamar Taj acolyte who was about to stumble into a portal one of her fellows was calling up.

In the back of his head, in the place where he had been whining earlier, Loki could imagine the Grandmaster's laughter: _Honey, that's just_ life, _ya know? Flerkins gonna eat, brutes gonna brute, and sometimes you just gotta get your hands dirty._ Loki bared his teeth in a rictus grin and vaulted over a parked car, calling up his _seidr_ for a bolt of green fire. Ebony Maw's perceptions were very difficult to fool, but could they be overloaded?

A long needle of high, pure, sound pierced the rattle and crash of the battlefield, making Loki's helmet ring like a bell and his teeth vibrate in their sockets. In an addendum to his previous mental remarks on brutes and flerkins, Loki noted that the Leewit was gonna Leewit. She was supposed to have followed Vision and Rhodes, but she had not. There was no way now to know if the disobedience had been deliberate or accidental and either way there was nothing for it but to go on.

The noise made several of the lesser acolytes wince and a few spells fizzle. Stark howled. “What, _both_ rugrats are on the field now?” A new fissure or two appeared in Cull Obsidian’s craggy skin. But neither he nor Ebony Maw faltered in their attempts on Strange. _Brutes gonna Brute._

And speaking of which, Loki finally found a moment to notice, they seemed to be at least one brute short: where was the Hulk?

The whistle broke off, to be replaced by a vicious stream of invective Loki was fairly certain none of the Midgardians had understood. “I don’t believe either of their species have ovipositors, actually,” he called, routing the words through one of the doubles to add to the confusion, “But I quite see why you thought they might.” He circled again, trying to find an opening in the maelstrom of flying objects that the Maw was calling up. Where was the Hulk? They needed a dread-naught in the field.

The Leewit’s next whistle was nearly inaudible; Loki felt it move through him like a wave, aware for the first time of the flexibility of his own skeleton, and then saw the wobble move through the flying defensive wall. A lump of concrete burst into powder. Loki barreled forward through the rapidly-closing hole in the Horsemen’s defenses, daggers out and ready to strike.

Some enterprising lackwit among the defenders had conjured up a pool of slippery, foul-smelling goo around the two, meant, surely, to impede their movements. A sound goal, that, assuming that they needed to move, which so far neither had. A change in the magical pressure suggested the Leewit was getting ready to throw another whistle into the mix. Loki launched himself hurriedly over the goo-moat, trying to strike before some other piece of friendly fire impeded him.

His knife placement was less than ideal, lodging point-down in the thick pads of hide below Obsidian's left shoulder-spur, but Loki defied anyone else to manage a better job in these circumstances. He tightened his grip on that dagger as though it were the one thing to keep him from falling back into the void again and struck wildly about with the other, while scrabbling with his legs, trying to get enough purchase on the behemoth's torso to be able to aim properly before –

He was going to count it as a victory that he didn't lose his grip on either dagger when he went flying. It happened so fast he had to guess at the mechanics of it from the dents he could see in his armor and feel throbbing in his flesh. If he'd had bones, surely one or two of them would have been broken.

In the space of two pained breaths, Loki became aware again of his surroundings: the swirl of the fight a furlong or so away, the knobbled surface of whatever lumps of rubble he’d landed on, a pair of gray-clad legs nearby. “Was I thrown this far, or dragged?” Loki asked, starting to push himself upright. 

“C’mon, you bastard, get out!” Graylegs answered, and Loki supposed he had a point; the question was of secondary importance at the moment. He got his feet under him and turned to address Graylegs.

Oh.

That remark had not, apparently, been to Loki’s address. 

The rest of Dr. Banner remained pinned by a fallen light pole, and rather than struggling to extricate himself, he was belaboring his own face, which flickered between pink and green. “C’mon!” he growled again, and the green flooded up his neck and half over his face just long enough for the Hulk to bellow, **“NO!”** before subsiding again.

So _that_ was where the Hulk was. Remarkably sensible of the creature. What a pity. Loki rolled, groaning, to his feet, and then undertook to lift the pole off the doctor. “Might I interest you in a knife, or two, Dr. Banner?”

The man squinted blearily at him. “Who are you?” Loki’s disguise must still be holding, then.

Loki shifted the pole to one side. “You may address me as ‘little green,’ provided you do not do so in Stark’s hearing,”

“Um.” Banner pulled himself upright, then jerked. “Oh, shit.” He pointed at a spot some way above the battleground. “Strange is down. So to speak.”

It was a blur of red. The limp form of Strange, wrapped in his Cloak, rose slowly through the air, shining in the beam of golden light that streamed from the ship.. The one Stark had called “Kid” had one of his silken strands attached to the wizard, and another to one of the few undamaged buildings, and seemed to be trying to haul their unconscious ally in as though reefing a sail. Stark looked to be going hands-on, the thrusters on his feet going full throttle as he tried to push Strange back to earth. It wasn’t working.

Loki watched the ground-level activity with narrowed eyes: Kamar Taji bounced in and out of portals like fleas, but they were growing thinner on the ground. Saving a few of them, they seemed inclined to give their doctor up for lost, to reconfigure themselves for the defense of the Sanctum itself, or possibly to join up with the guardians of the Mind Stone.

The Leewit had not quit the field. It took Loki a moment or two to spot her, perched as she was on the cornice of a window, out of the main blast zone but closer than Loki was, currently. Even at this distance and through the flying dust, Loki could see her face growing red with effort, her chest heaving and her cheeks distended as she unleashed whistle after whistle. Perhaps Loki should teleport himself to her and offer her assistance, or better yet, require it of her, for surely battle spells were his forte as surely as the delicate healing work from earlier in the day was hers. And if the child learned a thing or two about how to direct your power without using tenfold as much of it to try and control the flow, she might be a much more effective weapon.

Cull Obsidian charged forward with a roar, scattering acolytes. Ebony Maw didn’t even blink. Loki couldn’t imagine what it had taken for the creature to learn that kind of concentration. No, that was a lie; he could. He couldn’t imagine why Ebony Maw was still fighting _for_ his tutor, though.

“I don’t care how scared you are; we need to do this! NO!”

Loki decided to ignore Banner's argument with himself. He had no useful ideas on that front. He took a few steps toward the Leewit.

“Oh, look! It’s father’s toy!”

Obsidian’s roaring had words in it, thanks to the Allspeak. He loomed suddenly too close and large over Dr. Banner. “He enjoyed putting you in your place last time,” the Horseman continued, “I’m sure there’s more fun to be had out of you yet.”

Loki spun around and dove for Obsidian’s legs, meaning to hamstring him. He caught a single, indelible glimpse of the little, dusty man in his baggy gray garments, staring up at the adopted son of Thanos with his eyes and nostrils flared wide. In the next instant, the horn-plated fist came down and there was a crumpled heap on the ground, no longer defiant. 

Loki slashed and stabbed in a frenzy worthy of a Norstrilian Hittons mink, succeeding at last in drawing blood, but it was not enough to prevent Cull Obsidian from picking up the limp form of Dr. Banner and tossing it into the air, for Ebony Maw to send even further upward, toward the waiting ship. Only then did Thanos' largest “son” bother with the puny god at his feet.

Once again, Loki felt himself lifted in the air, an immense, inexorable hand clamped around his neck. Once again, his choices shrank down to the choice of lashing against the inevitable or dying with a last shred of dignity.

… Or were those the only two choices?

With the last air in his lungs, Loki hissed, “Vatch?”

No voice echoed inside his skull. The clutching hand continued to clutch. The searing yellow-green spots that slowly flooded Loki's vision spread without turning into gray nothingness. There was a blast of cold air. Loki felt himself falling.


	24. Spidey is Having Exactly No Fun

Peter's arms and shoulders burned, and his head throbbed. He didn't _exactly_ wish he'd listened to Mr. Stark and stayed out of this fight, because it was, like, super, super obvious that he was needed, but still, pain hurt, and these big flashy team-up style fights tended to screw with his enhanced senses. And that was before the Leewit really got going. So, like, he wasn't going to _whine,_ but this was definitely the not-fun part of being a superhero.

The Leewit's whistles were more directional than should be possible, Peter knew, hitting their targets almost like lasers. But if this was what it was like on the periphery, he'd hate to be Squidward. Even clear up here, it was like having needles poking through your jaw, or Mrs. Phan's kimchee being poured directly into your ear, or having a bunch of licorice-flavored maggots suddenly manifest in your lower intestines and start doing the cha-cha. Each one was different, and each one was awful. And none of it seemed to bother Squidward or Rock Steady. Peter wanted to believe the unrelenting pace of their attack was due to some kind of alien tech, maybe up on that torus-shaped UFO that hovered above the action the way bricks don't, because if it was tech, then he and Mr. Stark could crack it. And if it wasn't tech, then the two aliens were _that_ badass, and Peter didn't want to think about that at all.

He shouldn’t think about any of that right now. He had a job: get the guy in the red cape who wasn't Thor out of the grip of that tractor beam or whatever it was and back down to earth. Peter wriggled his feet a little more tightly under the loops of webbing he'd anchored to the side of the wall he was standing on, tightened his core, and pulled again on the web he had attached to Cape Guy. 

He was worried about materials integrity, now; he'd snagged Cape Guy with the webbing formula that even Peter couldn't break out of; even if something took Peter out, someone else could grab the line. Which meant Peter was in moderate danger of having joints dislocated if something went wrong. Worse yet, he wasn't sure how well the building he was attached to was going to hold up. Or what would happen if the tractor beam let go suddenly and the piece of sidewalk Cape Guy was lying on bungeed back this way. (Cape Guy himself would be fine, Peter was sure. Mr. Stark would take care of him.) Bending his knees and putting his whole back into it, Peter pulled another few inches' worth of slack in the line and got it hooked under the back of his right elbow. He couldn't tell if he'd managed to counteract the tractor-beam or if he was just maxing out on the elasticity of the web.

He squinted upward, trying to decide if Cape Guy looked any closer in, and spotted another human shape, this one kind of gray and floppy, closer to the ground but rising rapidly. Peter bit his lip; he might be able to snag that one with another web, but he'd have to at least partly let go of Cape Guy's tether to manage it…

Through the screams and sirens and the pounding music that some wiseass was playing from a boom box they'd aimed out the window, Peter still heard the heaving inhale from the corner where the Leewit perched. He braced himself.

This one ululated, warbling at the very top of Peter's hearing range and buzzing through his gloves and up his armbones – oh, wait – no – 

With a stupidly thin, quiet, _plink_ , the webbing snapped. Peter fell backward, slamming into the wall. Cape Guy sped away into the air. A little way below him, the Leewit's voice shrieked, “Oh, _Beelzit!”_

Peter had time for one gasping breath before a deafening crash made him think the building must be giving way after all. Even as he leaped for her, his eyes darted around, trying to figure out how to best grab the Leewit and swing to safety, but no, the noise was from the entire crapton of stuff Squidward had been throwing around falling to the ground all at once. He was able to lower both himself and the Leewit to the ground at a reasonable pace in the hush that followed.

The Leewit made no bones about wrapping herself around him, and her voice sounded teary. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I know I plorked it up, we’ll fix it, just you wait, I’m sorry.”

Peter gulped. “It’s… OK,” he lied valiantly, “It was gonna yank me up there too and that would’ve been a whole thing. We – we just have to regroup a little bit.”

On the ground level, the small army of wire-fu guys with the awesome portal powers were mostly filtering away again. From the sound of it, they were expecting a second attack somewhere, and Peter wondered if maybe he should offer to help. The Leewit, grim faced, clamped a bony hand around his elbow and tugged him toward a spot on the periphery, where a stocky monk bent over a long, thin, one who lay supine. As they got closer they realized the first one was prying the fingers of a huge severed hand from around the second one’s throat. Peter hurried forward.

“Hey! You need a, um, hand, with that? ‘Cause I’ve got super-strength and …” But the skinny monk with the world’s worst necklace drew a wheezing breath, and reached up to pry the remaining fingers away much more easily than his partner had managed. Another moment or two, and the saffron and maroon robes melted away to be replaced by dark green leather armor, and Peter recognized Loki. Well. That explained that, then. No, wait, no it didn’t. Peter cleared his throat. “So, was that the bad guy you came here to fight?”

The god ignored him, in favor of heaving himself up to a sitting position and breathing. “Why,” he muttered, “do they always go for a choke hold? Every single time?”

“I guess you just have one of those necks? But seriously, was that the guy?”

Loki rubbed absently at the aforementioned neck and turned his head to peer narrow-eyed at Peter. “Do I know you?” 

Oh. Right. Mask. Spider-man. But the Leewit spoke up before Peter could figure out what he was supposed to say to that. “You showed up in his bedroom the other day,” she informed their … Peter was gonna assume he was an ally until he got more info, because Loki had just gotten nearly killed by Rock Steady’s disembodied hand, plus if Loki was an enemy the Leewit probably would have said something about it by now.

“Ah.” Loki turned his eyes to the gray-brown hand, where it lay on the ground, and then up to the monk. “I assume I have you to thank for saving my life this time? Do we know where the rest of him is?”

The monk waved a dismissive hand. “Antarctica. Listen. You must go to Strange. You are the only one who can.”

Loki shifted the rubbing hand from throat to forehead. “And where is that, exactly?”

“He is on the ship! We cannot allow Thanos to take the Time Stone! You must go to them!”

“No,” Loki said flatly.

“If you need backup, I’ll go with you,” Peter insisted. “Mr. Stark is on that ship. If I can help him… well, I just, I have to. _Please.”_

“You will go on the ship,” the monk directed, “Or I will send you after Cull Obsidian.” He raised his hands.

Loki tossed his head. “Frost. Giant,” he enunciated. “I would not mind having the advantage for once. But how do you propose to send me to the ship?”

“You can go there,” the monk insisted. “We know this.”

“Then you know wrongly,” Loki growled. “Without the Tesseract, I am confined to certain paths, that will take me to certain places, and those only within the Nine Realms. Even with the Tesseract, I would have to know whither the ship was bound, and how quickly.” He sat up the rest of the way and contrived to look down his nose at his rescuer. “I assure you, Master Wong, I am entirely in sympathy with your aims. There are simply things I cannot do.”

Peter would admit that he did not have the best bullshit detector on the market, but he kinda thought Loki meant it. He didn’t look apologetic, or sad; he looked angry enough to spit nails. If Peter had been trying to wiggle out of doing something using his expression alone, he wouldn’t have gone with “about to explode” for the expression.

It seemed “Master Wong” thought the same, because his head and shoulders slumped in defeat. “So we must guard the Mind Stone with all we have left,” he said, and turned away. Peter lifted his chin and threw his shoulders back, trying to bite back tears. Mr. Stark was on that ship. And Peter… he couldn’t just stop. He couldn't.

He had completely forgotten the Leewit, which was… unwise. “I can get us there,” she announced.

Peter turned to stare at her, and he heard Loki scrambling to his feet. The girl looked a little subdued, compared to her usual, but there was no hint of doubt in her face or voice. “It’ll be clumping horrible,” she warned them, “and we won’t be good for much for a while after we get there, but we’ll _get_ there.”

“I’m in,” Peter said, at once, without thinking.

“How?” Loki demanded. 

“Egger route,” the Leewit answered, which didn’t seem to make any sense to Loki either. “I got an anchor into Tony, should hold up a little while yet. Might be better if we can get somewhere near him instead of right on top. You know the layout for ships like that one?”

“And why ‘horrible?” Loki asked, as if the Leewit hadn’t spoken.

“It just is,” the Leewit said glumly. “Witches try to be in a trance when we go through, just so we don’t ‘zactly remember how horrible it is. And even Captain Pausert’s never figured out how to deal with the shaking.”

The word shaking triggered something in Peter’s memory. “Wasn’t the Egger Route the way you came to our time in the first place? That thing where you had like a seizure in the living room before you whistled my web shooters apart? I thought you said you couldn’t do that.”

The Leewit’s eyeroll wasn’t quite as good as one of MJ’s but it was still pretty good. “Of course I _said_ I couldn’t do it. That way if I needed to, nobody would try to stop me. But it looks to me like we kinda need to, now.”

“I’m in,” Peter repeated staunchly, “what do we need to do?”

Loki took longer to respond, doubtlessly weighing the likelihood of doing anything useful for the “mind stone,” whatever that was, but he finally nodded. “I would be most… intrigued, to observe this method of transport,” he decided, “and I may have some power left to lend you should it be required.”

The Leewit shook her head. “Save it,” she advised. “One of us should still have some juice left when we get there and it clumping well doesn’t look like it’s gonna be me.”

Peter bounced on the balls of his feet. “So… we just, go now?”

The Leewit looked around. The edges of the battlefield were lined with police, now, with camera crews behind them. It wasn’t going to be long before someone decided to come interview the few people remaining on-site. “Guess we’d better,” she sighed. “Wish I could get something to eat first. And one of those helmets like the one Ned had when we went skateboarding that one time. But I guess we’d better”

Loki grinned suddenly. “A moment,” he said, and vanished. Out at the perimeter, several of the cops dove for their radio mics. Peter blinked. Loki returned. “Here.” He shoved a donut into the Leewit’s hand, and plunked a slightly-too-large bicycle helmet on her head. Peter decided not to ask. 

The Lewit crammed more than half the pastry into her mouth and chewed fiercely while she shortened the straps on the bicycle helmet, swallowed, shoved the remainder into her mouth, and then addressed Loki around it. “Sho do you know the layout of thoshe shipsh? Can you give me a mental picture? Or do we have to plan on landing in the middle of whatever Tony’s doing without being able to defend ourselves for a few minutes?”

Loki stroked his chin. “I believe I may be of some assistance,” he said finally, and set his right hand on the Leewit’s left temple. 

The two stood there for a moment, silent and blank-faced, and then the Leewit stepped back. “Got it,” she said. Then she drew herself up to her full inadequate height. “OK,” she said. “Loki, if you can put yourself in a trance, now’s the time.” Then she turned to Peter and gripped his shoulders. “Listen,” she said. “There’s going to be … things you see, while we’re bouncing around. You gotta remember, they’re not real! They’re not. Keep remembering that, because if you forget and think they’re real, they _can_ be.”

“Not real,” Peter gulped. “Got it.”

“So.” The Leewit said. She clamped a hand on Peter’s elbow again and guided him into place, just far enough from Loki that she could then wriggle between the two of them. Loki must have taken that advice about going into a trance seriously, because he simply waited, eyes shut, while she hooked an arm around his waist. “Here goes,” said the Leewit, and the ground swooped away, and then the shaking started.


	25. Regrettably Familiar Problems

Bruce wished this was the first time he had regained consciousness to find himself chained to a wall. It was not an experience that improved with repetition. Especially given that it was almost never _Bruce_ that his kidnappers wanted, not really. And it seemed Ebony Maw was no exception. The noseless creep postured just outside the reach of Bruce's chains in exactly the same way as he had back on Bleecker Street. Bruce didn't watch him, being more interested in sussing out his surroundings.

They were… brown, mostly, and metallic. The floor sloped away downward in both directions. Bruce's chains were looped around a horizontal cylinder that protruded from the wall, perhaps half a meter wide, with regular octagonal sections that encased it like beads on a chain. Bruce didn't… _think_ the space had been designed as a brig, which was… interesting. Maybe Strange was in the brig.

“Rejoice,” the Maw droned. “Rejoice that Cull Obsidian, my brother in arms and in upbringing, was so keen in his perceptions as to recognize you even in the feeble and paltry guise that now confines you. Rejoice, that even as this plan, millennia in the making, arrives at its culmination, even now the worthy may be rewarded, may be brought before our Master, be purged and tempered until your strength is as the adamantium, until the Great Purpose envelopes your every thought and action as the Void envelopes the planets and the stars.”

Bruce let his head flop back against the wall. “You want to recruit the Hulk,” he summarized. “That… hasn’t worked out very well for anyone else, historically.” Including Bruce. He clung to confusion, weariness, despair, to make sure the Other Guy’s anger stayed at bay for now. He had calculated the radius of the curve for the outer wall of the grim chamber they were in and concluded that he couldn’t do too much damage before the problem ceased to be Interstellar Voldemort Wannabe and became the much more urgent one of Breathing Vacuum.

“I am _rewarding_ you,” his captor admonished patiently, “For the valor with which you acquitted yourself when we came to recover the Tesseract. Long and long had it been since my Master last had the pleasure of a foe who made him work for his victory. To say nothing of the simple joy that comes of humbling the prideful, and teaching the strong to acknowledge the truly mighty. Stay with us though our coming victory, and perhaps Thanos will train you, as he trained me and my brethren.” The Maw made a fluid, obscure gesture that Bruce thought might be the alien equivalent to a shrug. “Or perhaps,” he concluded, “you will be among those who sacrifice themselves to Our Lady Death in the coming battle. A fine reward for your valor, either way.”

Bruce knew better than to argue with that kind of crazy. He'd prefer not to even have to listen to it. But there was always the chance that somewhere in the monologue was a snippet or two worth knowing. For instance…

“Er,” he cleared his throat. “Sorry, just… the Other Guy… doesn't really communicate with me; did you just say… Thanos defeated Hulk? As in, _defeated,_ defeated, not … chivvied him back into neutral territory, or...”

Ebony Maw did not blink, but his fingertips fluttered a bit. “Of course,” he said, “what else?”

Bruce reached up to rub his forehead. The chains on his wrists were almost too heavy for him to manage it. “I… don't think that's ever happened to him before.”

One thing he had, in his most secret soul, envied the Hulk for was his absolute fearlessness. Even on Sakaar, so far as Bruce could gather from what Thor had said, the Hulk hadn't been afraid. The Grandmaster had, more or less, bribed him: food, shelter, smash, what else could a rage beast want? But if Hulk had been defeated – truly defeated, for the first time in his existence … was that why he'd refused to come out since Bruce landed back on Earth?

“You will learn,” the Maw assured him serenely. “But just now, I must attend on my other prisoner. Your glorious fate is assured, but he… he still requires some… persuasion.”

_Oh god,_ Bruce thought, but there wasn't much he could do about it. Not yet. The wizened alien spun in the air, making his coattails swing, and floated away. 

“Jeeesus,” said a voice near Bruce's left foot. Ebony Maw spun back to look at its souce. “First Loki, now you, this Thanos guy really must have a thing for drama queens; I should introduce him to the Kardashians. Or, no, better, RuPaul. Might as well set a good example.” 

One of the panels on the floor must be a hatch, because Iron man was emerging from it and there hadn't been any of the telltale noises of him needing to repulsor his way though.

Ebony Maw flicked a dismissive glance at the newcomer. “You are not welcome here,” he declared.

Tony spread his hands. “Y'know, I was just thinking that exact same thing earlier today, when a couple of extraterrestrial blowhards were prancing around tearing up the streets of my home city and, oh, wait, that was you. So I feel fully justified in what I am about to do to your ass.”

The alien's expression didn't change – Bruce wasn't entirely sure it could, – but he drew his head back a little on his neck and his voice was a sneer. “What, exactly, do you imagine you can do?”

“Still working on that one,” Tony admitted. “Got any ideas, big guy? Not feeling green, are we?”

He was not feeling at all green, and he didn't want to think what the Maw (or Tony for that matter) might try to do and change that, if the Hulk decided to stay down. “You tell me how we do Code Green without risking hull integrity and I'm all ears,” he said instead.

“Well, there is that.” Tony hovered just above the hatch he'd emerged from, hands near his hips like an old-style Hollywood gunslinger, silent for a few breaths. Inside the helmet he might be despairing or biting back a grin; there was no way to tell.

The Maw tossed his head. “As much as I enjoy watching people wrestle with insoluble problems, I believe...”

“Oh,” Tony breathed, “You are _so_ my favorite, Bruce,” and then he raised his voice. “You know my favorite thing to do with insoluble problems? My absolute favorite?”

“Solve them?” Bruce suggested.

“Nope.”

Blue-white plasma shot from Iron Man's right gauntlet – not toward the Maw, who stood slightly to the side, ready to head down the corridor again, but directly in front of Bruce. Bruce drew breath to scream, then nearly lost it all in the concussion as his chains slammed into his chest and against his joints. He barely had time to blink tears away before a second burst came from the armor – not a beam of light this time, but a cloud of smoke that seemed to take half the armor with it. The smoke swept toward the same gaping hole in the side of the ship that Ebony Maw had just disappeared out of, but coalesced at the edges of the hole instead of sweeping out into the void. Another fraction of a second and the hole had irised closed, patched by a growing pool of… 

“Nanites,” Bruce said, when he could breathe again.

The remains of the armor retreated back under Tony's hoodie, revealing his sweat-stained, grinning face. “My very, very favorite thing to do with insoluble problems,” he panted, “is to make them problems for the other guys.” 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

There were reasons Karres witches didn't Egger blind if they could help it. Even in her best jacket and purloined helmet, the Leewit came to with all her joints throbbing from whatever she'd banged them against and a throat raw from screaming, and so hungry she felt herself choking on the emptiness. Loki had been able to give her a general layout of the toroid ship and some locations that were less likely to be frequented than others, but of course there was no way of knowing for sure that this one hadn't been modified somehow, to say nothing of the risk inherent in choosing a location that wasn't exactly the same place as her anchor. 

For these reasons, then, she was more relieved than not when the dim space around her resolved into … a cargo hold, she thought. Or possibly a very large pantry. Spaces were hard to judge in the dim light, but she thought this one must be at least as big as the hangar Tony had been working in, back on Yarthe. It was hard to tell, though, because the whole place was full of orange string. 

It looked a little like Peter's webbing, in fact: smooth, translucent, a little stretchy, perhaps – and it stretched and bifurcated and knotted like neural clusters, or the inside of an oak gall, suspending ominous bulks in carefully spaced intervals around the hold – some bound so close together it was hard to tell one solid shape from the next, others in isolated splendor within a whole insulating cocoon of the orange stuff. Some of the webbing suspended lengths of metal sheeting, punched through with rows of holes. From certain angles, these seemed to form a crude path through the maze. Particularly if there were ways to raise and lower the platforms that were not immediately apparent. The entire hold seemed to bounce and sway gently, all the pieces at slightly different rhythms and frequencies.

“Why am I wet?”the Leewit grumbled. She patted vaguely at herself and identified the source of moisture as her left-hand inner pocket, which contained, on investigation, the smashed remains of the pear she’d snagged at breakfast, mixed with the mass of crumbs that had once been her spare bagel. She wished she'd remembered them before they left Bleecker Street. The Egger route and the post-Egger thrashing had really done a number on them. “Gwl,” the Leewit said, shaking her sticky fingers. “I was just hoping I could find some food in this place but I think I’ve changed my mind.”

An answering whimper helped her locate Peter, draped half on, half off one of the catwalk platforms, his Spidey uniform showing a lurid, lava red and sickly green-black in the strange light. “Mmwuwbbl,” he groaned, slowly pulling himself upright, “You were right, Leewit, that was awful! There was… there was a, a me that was… a pig? It _sucked._ At least it worked, though, right? I mean, did it work?”

“Unless we managed to land on some other spaceship,” the Leewit said unhelpfully. Her stomach growled. “Where's Loki?” She couldn’t make out any other humanoid shapes in her immediate surroundings.

“Fie upon your promises!” One of the boulder-sized lumps suspended in the webbing beyond the Leewit’s platform spat at her. After a moment’s staring, the Leewit identified a seated figure resting its head on drawn-up knees. “I’ll have you know,” he went on without bothering to look up, “that I was quite looking forward to horrors that I knew to be false ahead of time. And instead you send me hurtling through a void I remember only too well, facing nothing I did not already know to be true.” 

The lump began unfolding, slowly, making unhappy noises and then a loud squawk when Loki’s foot slipped and went through a hole in the webbing. “Son of a bilgesnipe!”

“Whoa, you OK?” Peter squeaked, skittering through the twanging orange fibers as if they were normal byways – well, for him, they probably were. “I mean, no, um, headaches or anything? Aaaand you’re green. Way green. Why are you green? Or maybe it’s blue? The lighting in here is weird.”

Loki spared the boy a single withering glance before clambering past him to the Leewit’s platform. “You. Mad. Thing,” he hissed at her. “What manner of people do you come from, that they imagine the Void a place to send _children?”_

The Leewit blinked up at him. Loki was, as Peter had said, blue-green about the face and hands, which seemed like it was probably a bad sign, given what little anyone had said on the topic before, and when he snorted air at her she felt the cold of it on her face. And she had almost no idea what he was talking about – the Egger route? A void? She brushed her hair out of her eyes to give herself time to think. “Huh. Never heard of anyone’s Eggerspace being a void before. Closest would be Maleen’s and that’s all wet and full of … currents and bubbles and things. Anyway, I told you it would be awful.”

Loki shut his mouth with a snap and glowered. “We need to find a floor hatch,” he decided. “Valuable cargo, including prisoners, are much more likely to be kept in the chambers along the inner ring of the toroid than the outer. Or else in the docking square.” He twitched his shoulders and turned decisively in the direction in the orange maze that seemed most likely to lead downward.

“Works for me,” Peter announced, jumping off the platform and swiveling his way among the orange strands.

“Fine,” the Leewit agreed. “Just let me know if we find the galley or something. I am _starving.”_

^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

“OK,” Tony said, “If it were my ship – and believe me, this is going to be my ship eventually – I'd have most of the good stuff in the tail of the Q and/or the inner part of the torus ring; seems more defensible that way, right?”

“Sure,” Bruce grunted, checking himself over as best he could for cracked ribs or other problems from his recent narrow escape from being blown out the side of a spaceship. Speaking of which… “How much time do you figure we have before Maw's backup comes looking for him?”

Tony startled. That was an embarrassingly obvious question. Tony was embarrassed. To be fair, there were a lot of obvious questions right now, including: How long until the Bleeding Edge nanites had replicated enough of themselves to make a fully functional suit? How secure was the nanite patch job, anyway? And underneath it all the steady ostinato: _Gottafind Strange, Gottafind Strange, Gottafind Strange…_ “I didn't run into anyone while breaking in here,” he said aloud. “And, the ship might not support as many crew as we'd think automatically. I mean, on earth a structure like this would hold a couple hundred people, easy, but on earth none of the buildings have to maintain a whole biosphere…” He sighed and squared his shoulders. “But what the hell do I know about alien life support tech. Pretty sure the hull breach would've triggered something, though...”

“Something like automatically sealing all the hatches leading to this piece of the ship?” Bruce suggested with raised eyebrows. “I mean, if I had the choice between confronting an alien with unknown powers that just took out my boss or trying to quarantine it until it stopped wriggling...”

Tony flared his eyebrows in exaggerated surprise. “Brucie, space invaders with common sense? Are you implying that Hollywood _lied_ to us?”

“Maw assumed he'd be able to contain the Hulk here,” Bruce pointed out. “If what he said earlier is right and Thanos defeated the Other Guy… that may not have been as arrogant as I was thinking at first.”

“Well, shit.” Tony blew out a puff of air, drumming his fingers against his thigh. He cast a glance at the silver nanite patch against the brown wall. “Worst case,” he decided, “I could open that up again and come around the outside, but...” he looked back at Bruce.

“Yeah, no,” his friend agreed. “Maybe you could start by doing something about these chains?”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Leewit would have given a lot – say, a whole megasecond's worth of dull-as-eggs computer code translation – to be able to have a proper meal and a nap. After all, if the battle was still going on aboard this ship, it wasn't doing so anywhere near _them,_ and the Leewit didn't have a whole lot left to give. While Peter and Loki did that weird male thing where they tried to one-up each other without looking like they were one-upping each other, slithering and clambering among the webs of cargo string and octagonal barrels of who knew what, she plodded steadily along the few flat panels and stuck to the tunnels. Once they knew how things stood, she promised herself, she'd find a hidey-hole to curl up in for a snooze.

“I would not be surprised,” Loki's voice floated from somewhere below her, “If the ship proved to be empty save for the two we have already met. Any who aided them could claim a share in the glory afterward, and no son of Thanos would tolerate such a thing were it not necessary. And it would not be necessary, with this ship.”

“Well that's … good, I guess?” Peter threaded himself though a gap between two long ribbons of orange and shoved the heavy-looking lump they encased to one side. It nearly slammed into Loki as it sprang back into place.

Any verbal response Loki might have made was lost in the sudden hooting blare of a klaxon. Peter spasmed into a ball, his arms clutching around his head and his knees coming up to his chest far too quickly for it to have been a deliberate choice. He bounced slightly on the piece of netting he'd fallen to. Loki's head jerked around as though looking for the source of the sound, and then he shook it impatiently. The sound cut off abruptly as it had begun. Peter whimpered. Loki's hand went to his dagger.

“Hull breach alarm,” he said tightly. “Find it, and we find our allies, most likely.”

“Cool,” Peter moaned, slowly coming out of his crouch. “How do we do that?”


	26. It’s Always Time For a Strategy Meeting

It quickly became apparent that the control system of an Eelnats model Q-13122 (or, that’s what Loki said the ship was) was not susceptible to wireless hacking by a Stark-made AI, nor by Tony Stark himself, with or without nanite-based assistance. However, if, in the wake of a hull breach and the attendant automatic safety measures, Mr. Stark and Mr. Stark’s AI both happened to try and hack the control system of an Eelnats model Q-13122 at the same time, then neither had any difficulty identifying the other, nor with re-opening the comm lines between their two suits. 

Peter came to understand this interesting piece of trivia in the wake of a sudden, spine-melting sense of relief that he only afterwards recognized as a reaction to the voice in his ear, and it was only after that that he thought to pay any attention to what the voice had actually _said._ Or, y’know, growled.

“Karen,” the voice said, “tell me that’s not you.”

“That’s not me, Mr. Stark,” Karen replied obediently. Peter bit back a snicker.

Peter’s response, or maybe just the fact that he’d slowed down in the race to the hold’s exit hatch, brought Loki up close; Peter could feel the sudden chill in the air at his back even through the suit. “Something amuses you?” Loki’s voice didn’t sound nearly as angry as Mr. Stark’s but it was a lot less comforting, overall.

“Just made contact with Mr. Stark,” Peter explained, craning his neck backward. “Umm, can you tell me what’s going on at – uh, I mean, this is Spider-man, requesting a … sit… rep? Have you found Cape Guy yet? Do you need cover?”

Ton- Mr. St- Iron Man’s response was not very… tactics-y. “How the hell did you get here, kid? You were going to ground. I saw you. ‘That’s unusually smart of him,’ I thought.”

Peter figured if there were anything really urgent going down right then, there wouldn’t be time for lectures, and relaxed further. “Well,” he said, “It all happened pretty fast? But, after my web snapped and I got the Leewit down she took me to a place where this guy – I think his name was Master Wong? Where this guy was peeling a fff-rickin’ ginormous hand from around – uh…” Peter looked up at Loki, who had crowded even closer in what was probably an attempt to eavesdrop. “Um, are we still not supposed to say your name out loud? Because last time I saw you you were kinda insistent on that point and I don’t wanna….”

“Mask off, kid, NOW!” Mr. Stark bellowed through the comm link, and followed it up with, “Karen, max output on the speakers. Make sure everyone can hear me, not just Spidey.”

Peter scrabbled hastily out of the cowl. Max volume on the speakers was a lot louder than Mr. Stark knew, given the tinkering he and Ned had done that time they’d been trying to eavesdrop on the UN meeting. Sound quality, though, that was another story. Mr. Stark’s voice over the speakers came off more tinny than threatening as he started berating his former – or maybe not all _that_ former – enemy:

“Now you listen here, Loki of Asgard. I don’t care how powerful you are or how much we need you. Bringing a kid into something like this? So not cool. So very, very much the opposite of cool. And I’m telling you now – anything happens to the kid on this ship – if he gets a goddamn _hangnail_ – You. Will. Pay. I will make you fucking nostalgic for the times you were just being tortured by Gilbert Grape, trust me.”

Loki endured this tirade with arms akimbo, pinched nostrils, and compressed lips. Before Peter could stammer out something about how Mr. Stark wasn’t being fair, how Peter had insisted on coming because he couldn’t lose another fa- uh- because he couldn’t just let things happen when he could do something about them… Before Peter could figure out just what he needed to say, Loki sniffed loudly enough to be sure the audio pickups in the spider-cowl had picked up on it and said, “I tremble before your wrath, Stark. In case you were wondering, Cull Obsidian was last seen falling through a portal into Antarctica, minus one hand. He is most likely not dead but is not expected to show up and bother us any time soon. Now, could you possibly see your way to informing us about events on your end? Have you located Dr. Strange? Or Ebony Maw?”

For some reason the question elicited a burst of static on the comm, as if Mr. Stark were spitting, or… laughing? “Yeah, OK. No on the first one, yes on the second. That’s what the hull breach was for. Unless Maw can breathe vacuum, we’re down to four Horsemen. Or, say, three point… do we wanna count volume, mass, or function percentages for that missing hand?”

A very faint sound in the background might have been someone else saying, “Tony...”

“And Bruce is with me,” Mr. Stark concluded. “Kinda banged up, maybe a cracked rib or three, but I’ve got him free of the chains they were keeping him in, and that’s all gonna go away the next time he goes green. We were just trying to figure out what we could do about the blast doors keeping us in this segment of the ship. Suit’s a little… not at 100% awesome right now; I lost a lot of nanites patching that nice hole in the hull….” he paused to snicker again, “Maybe want a little more time before I try to blast any more metal open.”

Loki had nothing to say to this, and Peter took another moment to collect himself. They were OK. He and… and someone called “Bruce” were both OK. Of course, that still left Cape Guy, or maybe Bruce was Cape Guy, but… 

The Leewit shouldered past him and snaked an arm past a few more orange strands to poke at a knob on the wall. A few yards below them, a door slid open and stayed that way, the light that filtered from it still dingy and yellowish, but visible.

“OK,” Peter said out loud. “Um, we’re all fine here, haven’t seen anyone since we came onboard and Loki thinks there might not be anyone because… bad guy politics, I think. Anyway, we’re gonna make our way to the main control cabin and if we get there we can for sure let you guys out, so… I dunno, hang tight and keep in touch? If your suit doesn’t recover right away we’ll let you out as soon as we can.” 

For some reason, this made the Leewit turn around and glare at him.

“What?”

She growled. “We had clumping well better find some food before we go mucking around in the ship systems, or else I am –“

A squeal of feedback from the suit speakers drowned out the rest of her threat. “You brought the Leewit too?” Mr. Stark howled, _“LOKI!!!”_

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Despite the Leewit’s grumbling, they did rescue Dr. Strange before they found the galley, if only because the chamber being utilized as a brig was on their way and Peter’s enhanced senses caught it. Loki had been halfway through an attempt at a layman’s explanation of the ship’s tractor beam technology (which, in field form, allowed the floor hatches in the outer layer of the ship torus to also be floor hatches for the inner layer, and Peter was so totally nerding out about that he could not even) when Peter went still, cleared his throat, and said, “OK, so, either something’s wrong with the gravity field right here that’s making weird harmonics, or we’re all being bathed in some horrible space radiation thingy and now we’re sterile, or someone on the other side of that hatch is humming the Piña Colada song.”

From there, it was the work of minutes before they were prying Dr. Strange (and Peter totally wasn’t judging but that was kind of a lame superhero name, though he’d admit it was better than Cape Guy) out of the brackets that kept him hanging against the wall. (The cape wriggled out from behind him and helped take his weight, which was freaky awesome and maybe Cape Guy was the more appropriate name after all.) 

The Sorcerer Supreme seemed pretty chill for someone who’d been hanging from a wall for the last however long. He listened attentively to Loki’s brisk update, thanked them for getting him down, and was dismissive of any other concerns they expressed. “I’m fine,” he insisted, “I haven’t even died once yet; you’ve no idea how much simpler that makes things.” Which… yeah, Peter was not touching that one.

Anyway, they barely had time to let Mr. Stark know they’d found Strange before the Leewit folded herself determinedly through the hatch and started marching back up the corridor in the direction Loki said the living quarters were in. She didn’t complain aloud again about being hungry, but Peter caught her eyeing a doughy lump of something she’d pulled out of her pocket as if she were thinking of taking a bite. Loki noticed too and snorted.

“You are a worse glutton than Volstag, child.”

The Leewit shrugged, entirely unrepentant. “Egger route really takes it out of you,” she said. “I hope I can get a nap in, too.”

Dr. Strange, who had been trudging rather wearily beside them, looked up at this. “Did you say ‘Egger route,’ Leewit? As in, ‘I’m real sorry but I can’t show you the Egger route because I don’t know how to do that part,’ _that_ Egger route?”

The Leewit nodded, grinning. “I lied,” she told him.

Dr. Strange sighed and rubbed a trembling hand across his face. “Ah.”

And that was all he had to say until they met up with Mr. Stark and Bruce, who turned out to be _Doctor_ Bruce Friggin’ _Banner!_ Chief author of _Mitochondrial Protein Reactions and Lipoid Toxin Retention_ Bruce Banner. And Strange knew him already! Peter really could. Not. Even.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

An hour’s time found everyone but the Leewit, including Stark and Banner, sitting on the floor of an area Loki assured them was generally equipped as a mess hall, though it looked to Peter pretty much like all the other metal- lined chambers they’d passed through so far – no table or serving implements to be seen. (The Leewit was there, too, but not sitting. She had consumed enough of the nutrient slurry that was all there was in the galley to keep Thor and all three of the Warriors Three going all day, and then collapsed in a snoring heap. Dr. Strange’s cloak had eventually tucked itself around her.)

Loki, when Peter had said something about the sparse decor, had sighed. “That is because the Titan is a cheapskate,” he stated. “The Q-13122 is intended for diplomats and traders in small-mass luxury goods, and the living quarters are intended to be able to double as meeting rooms and the like. One can – or could, before the Titan requisitioned the factory – order one with a wide variety of fittings, including aeroponic gardens with marble decorative elements for the deluxe models, or simple polysilicate floor tiles if one was on a budget. The Mad One has no interest in such niceties, and if his followers feel differently on the matter they have learnt to hide it.”

Peter nodded thoughtfully and Dr. Strange clicked his tongue. “To quote the boundless wisdom of the Ancient One, sucks to be them. We have more urgent matters to discuss.”

Mr. Stark snickered. “I mean, we can discuss it, but it’s not gonna help. The only one of us who knows how to fly this thing is Loki, and he’s on my side.”

“You are mistaken in your assumptions, Stark.”

“You _literally_ just said the only way we had a hope against the Titan is if we got another stone. That sure doesn’t sound like ‘turn this ship around right now’ to me.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “You are mistaken in your assumption that I know how to fly the ship. Or any ship designed to handle interstellar travel. I can do certain things with wormholes, when we encounter them, but not in a vessel of this kind.”

“Oh.” Tony blinked. “Should’ve said something earlier. Like, back while we were still communicating via Karen, earlier. Now I have to redo all my plans.”

Peter twiddled his fingers. “We should be able to figure it out, though, right? I mean, you’re a genius, Dr. Banner’s another one, I’m pretty good, and like, how smart can that rhinoceros guy be, anyway? You gotta think the interface would be pretty intuitive.”

“We must do so quickly, then” Strange insisted. “Listen: ever since Loki’s warning I have been using the Stone to review as many possible futures as I can, to seek out the ones where we are victorious. So far, I have found only five, among millions. They all stemmed from instances where I was able to assist in the defense of the Mind Stone, once our own attackers were defeated. We may already be too late, but we _must_ return to Earth.”

The cape stirred, then tried to tighten around its shifting bundle of slowly awakening Leewit, and then jerked suddenly as if it had been hurt, somehow, and snapped away from her.

“Sorry,” the Leewit mumbled, and then, “Alvus ‘r jusoo?” She pushed herself upright and blinked at everyone. “Well?”

Bruce looked over at her, the first time in a while that he’d bothered to take his head out of his hands. “I’m sorry, Leewit, I don’t think any of us caught that.”

The Leewit rubbed her eyes and rolled her shoulders. “Do we all need to go back, or just you, Dr. Strange? ‘Cause if it’s just you than the rest of us can keep looking for the other stones.” She reached up as if to run a hand through her hair, clonked it against the bike helmet, let he the hand down again, and stretched.

“You mean send him back by the eggy thing?” Peter asked, “You sure you have the juice for that?”

The cloak zipped over next to Dr. Strange and shook itself out like a curtain between him and the Leewit. It did not appear to care for the idea.

The Leewit stood up and engaged in some more vigorous waking-up sorts of exercises, swinging her arms and bending in various directions. “Oughta be OK,” she told them. “Specially if Loki helps out like he said he would. Or _anyone else who might be lurking around,”_ she added with a pointed glare at one of the pipes that ran along the top of the chamber they were in, “who might be interested in getting people to the right place at the right time, seeing as how much interfering they've been doing already.” 

Everyone else looked at the spot she was glaring at, confused. Bruce and Peter turned their gazes to the Leewit, their faces concerned. Loki and Dr. Strange continued to stare at the spot that had her attention, trying to see what she saw.

Tony watched both groups for a second, then sighed. “Let me guess. 'vatch'?”

“Uh-huh,” the Leewit answered, her gaze never wavering from the invisible something.

“Are you certain it is _your_ vatch?” Loki mused, his eyes not quite focused, though his gaze followed the little witch's. “I felt the wards you showed me engage, but I thought it might have been that the Titan watched over our battle on the street.”

The Leewit blinked. “Wards? Oh. You mean the vatch lock. Just so you know, that just keeps them from doing things to your mind or eavesdropping on your thoughts; they can still jerk you around plenty if they feel like it. And I dunno what the Titan has going on but I haven't relled anything except old Bossy over there.”

She tossed her head, then her voice and expression turned oddly maternal. “Look,” she said to the thing none of the others could see. “You told me at the beginning of this that this wasn't a game. I don't know what you're trying to do, but maybe it would go better for you if you actually worked with us instead of just pushing us around?”

For some reason, this made Tony laugh. “Oh, kid,” he grinned. “SHIELD is _so_ lucky they never actually got their hands on you...”

In the next instant, he stopped laughing. Stopped breathing. An immense voice came out of nowhere, surrounding them utterly. **YOU MAY HAVE A POINT,** it said.

Everything around them went gray.


	27. OK, Maybe We DO Need Stinkin' Vatches

He had forgotten this horror. He had truly forgotten, in the welter of intimate, personal torments he had endured over the last few years, in the loss of his home and family, thrice over, in the stark pain of the Other’s ministrations and the Mind Stone’s oil-slick rape, in the vibrating web of tensions that made up his stolen court and throne, Loki had forgotten the void. And so the Norns, being evil and depraved, had seen fit to remind him. Twice in the span of a day, no less! And none of the miseries Loki had endured before or since left him any more able to face it. 

At least the first time the Leewit warned him. She hadn’t said it would be the Void they were facing, but she had told him enough that Loki had known to call upon the discipline Frigga had taught him, to divorce sensation from consciousness and allow himself to exist in a realm that was neither of those things wholly. Even thus prepared, the journey left him drained and jumpy. He could remember only a hurtling, lurching sense of motion and an abiding sense of shame, and the roar of his own racing heart didn’t truly fade from his ears until forced out by the hull breach alarm. 

The second time, he was not granted even this tiny mercy. He had no warning before the moment save a vague sensation of being watched, and the snap of his new wards activating. And no one raised under Heimdall’s attention and honed in the “service” of the Titan would consider either of these any great matter. Loki was always prepared to be watched. What he was not prepared for was the Leewit breaking every fundamental rule of spycraft and addressing their watcher directly. Nor for the being’s response, which was to return them all immediately to the Void.

This time there was no sense of velocity, no vague notion that there must be a Loki to move, if he felt himself moving. No other being probed at him or impinged upon him, no outside sensation provided any idea of not-Loki for Loki to define himself against. Nothing to rebel against, nothing to subvert, nothing to manipulate. Loki’s innards turned hollow with dread, and nothing in the horrible featureless, scentless, silent, numb gray that surrounded him gave him a boundary to contain them. He was… unmade, dissolving…

“OK.”

The word hit him like a splash of cold air, or like a head-on collision with a bilgesnipe. The Leewit was there in the void as well. The Leewit was obdurate, definite, neither deceptive nor comprehensible, was certainly not Loki. Loki was not alone. Loki was… Loki was. He did his utmost to pull himself together and pay attention.

“Are you finally gonna tell us what you want us to do for you?” the Leewit demanded.

Loki felt the answer echo in his chest. Like the Mind Stone, and Thanos’ orders through it. Like the voice that had sent him to Midgard and claimed it would be “fun.” Was this voice the same as one of those? The same as both of them?

 **NOT QUITE YET, I DON’T THINK,** it said.

“Not an answer that inspires a great deal of cooperation,” said… that was Strange, the holder of the Time Stone. Were the others here, too? The ones who did not use magic?

“Stark, are you here as well?” Loki asked. He could not quite tell, somehow, if he was hearing his own voice or merely imagining it. In either case, the smith did not respond.

“I bet whatever it is has something to do with the Infinity Stones,” the Leewit probed. “Hantis told us once vatch senses don’t do so good with singularities, so that’s definitely something you’d need other people to help you with.”

The Vatch, assuming that was what the entity was, produced an impression of amusement without having a visible form or an audible voice.

“If you won’t tell us what you wish to accomplish,” Strange broke in, “then why should we help you? What benefit will there be to us?”

**IF MY GOALS ARE ACHIEVED, THANOS WILL EXIT YOUR REALM AND CEASE TO TROUBLE IT.**

All of which was well and good, however…

“And what shape will the realm be in when he does?” Strange asked, before Loki could. “It doesn’t do us much good to get rid of him after he succeeds in killing most of us off. And what happens to his followers? How much trouble can they make?”

If he had been in a place that had air, or a need for working lungs, Loki would have sighed in satisfaction. It seemed a few Midgardians understood proper bargaining after all.

 **THE ANSWERS TO THOSE QUESTIONS ARE OF LITTLE INTEREST TO ME** , the vatch declared. **IF YOU PLAY THE GAME WELL, YOU MAY WELL ACHIEVE YOUR OWN OBJECTIVES AS WELL AS MINE.**

“If you want our cooperation,” Strange advised, “You had best see to it that you help us toward our goals as well.”

**I ALREADY HAVE, AND WILL CONTINUE DOING SO. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?**

“I want the Stones scattered, hidden away in places no one person, the Titan included, will ever get a hold of all of them, whether they try from this realm or any other.” Strange said bluntly. “What can you do to assist us?”

**NOTHING. I NEED THE STONES UNITED IN ONE PLACE AND TIME.**

Loki felt the sorcerer gathering his power around himself, ready to strike at the vatch right then and there. Assuming he could find the “there.” Loki wondered if the human was having any better luck locating the thing than he was himself. 

**HOWEVER,** the vatch went on, **I DO NOT NEED THEM UNITED UNDER ONE PERSON’S CONTROL. IF YOU WISH TO KEEP THE STONES OUT OF THANOS’ HANDS, YOU MAY DO SO.**

Strange subsided a little, but not very far. “To do that,” he said, “I need to be able to join Vision and Colonel Rhodes and their allies, and prevent the capture of the Mind Stone. We’ve seen examples of your ability to manipulate space and time. I would take it as a show of good faith if you would send me there and have me arrive soon enough to do some good.”

**DONE.**

There was a brief, choked-off _awp_ noise from Strange, and then only Loki, the Leewit and the vatch remained suspended in the gray. (Or maybe the Vatch _was_ the gray?)

The Leewit sniffed. “You sent him by Egger, didn’t you,” she said. “Meanie.”

 **AND WHAT OF YOU, LITTLE WITCH?** The vatch replied, ignoring the Leewit’s epithet. **YOU ARE THE ONE WHO DECIDED IT WAS TIME TO MAKE DEMANDS.**

“I’m _thinking!”_ The Leewit protested, and since no one could see him, Loki allowed himself to boggle at the sheer gall of the child. “ ‘Sides,” she went on, “Wasn’t a demand, it was just a suggestion. I suggested that maybe you were being kind of a dope and you decided to talk to us.”

Norns, she was being pert – pert! with a creature of the Void, one that, whatever its limitations, had powers not even Thanos possessed, powers to rival two of the Infinity Stones at the very least. Not even Thor could be so reckless. Loki felt a brief pang of fondness for the bright, ephemeral creature that was doubtless about to get herself killed in some spectacular way.

 **DID IT NEVER OCCUR TO YOU** , the vatch went on, **THAT YOUR BEHAVIOR TO ME MIGHT JEOPARDIZE THE CONVENIENT ARRANGEMENT KARRES HAS WITH THE LITTLINGS WHO ACCOMPANY SO MANY OF YOUR SHIPS, INCLUDING _THE PETEY B?_**

He couldn't see her, but Loki could clearly picture the Leewit’s little head tilt. “Nah,” she said, “that’s about kids and candy. Pretty sure you couldn't stop all of them even if you wanted to.”

And that implied…. that implied that not only was the Leewit reckless enough to negotiate with the vatches, but that her people were, too. Loki firmly squashed the little sprig of curiosity trying to sprout in his mind. Whatever Karres was, this was not the time to mull it over. He cleared his throat. “I believe those of us aboard this ship would be a sufficient force to obtain the Aether from Knowhere, provided we got there before the Titan’s people did. If it is not already too late.”

 **IT WON’T BE,** the vatch assured them ambiguously, and then the void filled briefly with the sensation of movement.

^^^^^^^^^

The X-Men, Rhodes thought appreciatively, did not mess around. Within minutes of his and Vision’s arrival on the school grounds, the youngest kids were already being evacuated, popping out of thin air in the company of a thin, blue man with a tail. Every time he showed up again, he brought someone in the X men’s fighting uniform back with him, and then he’d put his long blue arms around the shoulders of a couple more tense-faced munchkins lugging duffle bags and _bamf_ away again. Another knot of people, including slightly older children, gathered around a building that might be an airplane hangar. Rhodes would swear he could pick up the sounds of pre-flight checks from here. Wanda tore across the field toward them, followed more sedately by a tall, redheaded woman a little younger than Pepper. Jean Gray, he remembered suddenly, the name coming into his head in a voice not quite his own. He and Tony had both spoken with her a time or two – circumspectly - when they’d had or wanted information that seemed like it might impact the mutant community. She gave Rhodey a nod as soon as she was certain he’d seen her, and then her voice had sounded through his comm link. At least, he was going to assume it was his comm link and never ask otherwise, because plausible deniability was a thing here for sure.

“Charles is keeping watch,” she said. Over what, exactly, Rhodey wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “And, as you see, we’re mobilizing. We… believe … that the Titan’s agents are monitoring us, or at least trying to, in hopes of surprising Vision when he’s alone, or with only one or two people as backup, so we’re going to try and prevent that happening. Hopefully, by the time they decide they have to go frontal assault, we’ll be even more ready for them.”

“Sounds like a plan” Rhodey said, because that sounded more polite than “acknowledged,” and because this wasn’t the time to point out what plans did when you made contact with the enemy. “You hear that, Wanda? Viz? No privacy until after the Space Thugs get dealt with.” Neither of them moved, however. Wanda remained wrapped around her robot boytoy like a coat of paint, and Vision stroked her hair while he scanned the surroundings with his yellow eyes.

The air filtration system in the Iron Patriot suit switched over to internal with a little hum, but not before Rhodey caught a whiff of tobacco. “I was promised beer,” said a growling voice.

Rhodey turned around and looked down a little. “Better be,” he agreed, “if you’re sticking with us. Otherwise I’ll be spending days looking at your ugly mug stone-cold sober, and we can’t have that.” To say nothing of days in the braces and the suit. His muscles were going to be tightened up like week-old chewing gum if this went on too long.

Wolverine snorted acknowledgment and took a position on the other side of the reunited couple.

Ms. Gray’s head snapped up. “Something’s coming!” she called, “Be ready!” 

The mob of kids hanging around the airplane hanger disappeared inside it faster than a dropped sandwich at a dog park. Blue Guy showed up again, panting, with one more big guy in tow, took a look around, and chivied the last of his mob of small fry into the hangar as well. There were thunks and clanks and the sound of a jet engine warming up. And then there was another sound: a penetrating hum that managed to be deep and high-pitched, both at once, making ears buzz and the walls of the hangar vibrate. Then the sound ceased abruptly in a crump of displaced air, and Dr. Strange arrived.

Their ally lay sprawled on the ground, or – actually, just above it, as if he were on an invisible air mattress – and to all appearances he was out cold. 

“Friendly!” Rhodes shouted, just in case any of the X-gang didn’t recognize him. “He’s a friendly! Viz, does he need help?”

Vision set Wanda down on her feet. His eyes lit as they did for certain scans. “I am uncertain,” he announced. “I can detect no signs of breathing, nor a heartbeat. However...”

“Yeah, fuck that noise,” Rhodes decided. Iron Patriot could do defibrillator shocks just fine if need be. He twitched his fingers in sequence to call up the protocol as he took another three strides and made ready to kneel by their wizard. Oh, God, he almost wished the Leewit's treatments hadn't worked so well because his legs were gonna kill him later.

One of Strange’s arms twitched, then one of his knees, making Rhodey pause before shocking him. Then his whole body convulsed in something that might have been a grand mal seizure, except then he crooked his elbow and threw it out as if he were in an invisible, horizontal barroom brawl. Rhodey leaned back a couple inches.

Strange’s cape, which had been stretched out beneath him rather like a hammock, wrapped around his body and jerked into the air. The piece of cloth seemed to expand, until it had the jerking man completely swaddled in red folds, with a little more left over to drape over him. The overall effect was a bit like Fozzie Bear trying to fight his way out through a pair of curtains.

“However,” Vision went on as if nothing had interrupted him, “It may be simply that he was not wholly in sync with our dimension, and the affected vital organs were still, as it were, phasing in.”

Rhodes tilted his head up to keep an eye on their newly arrived mystical blanket burrito. “OK,” he said thoughtfully, “that is the… I’m gonna go with … fifth. That is the fifth-weirdest thing I have seen this week.”

The growling and grunting noises coming from the cape suddenly resolved into intelligible speech. “Yes, yes, I’m back to full consciousness, _will you stop that!”_ The blanket unwound to become a cape once again, hanging demurely from the shoulders of an unusually disheveled Dr. Strange. He floated a good eight feet above the ground, surveying his new environment, then suddenly looked greenish and sat down in midair with his head thrust between his knees. “If that’s the Egger route,” he muttered, “I’d rather walk.”


	28. Engineering Problems

The gray dissolved, leaving the five occupants of the ship’s mess hall blinking and trying to re-orient themselves.

“Whoa,” Peter said. “I kinda blanked out there for a sec. Maybe I’d better have one of those nutri-pack things.”

The Leewit opened her mouth to reply, but Bruce beat her to it. “So it wasn’t just me, then?” He had his head resting on his knees and seemed disinclined to look up just yet. The Leewit closed her mouth and stood up, ready to head to the storage cubby for more nutri-paks. 

“It was all of us,” Tony assured his friend. “One minute the Leewit’s complaining about her imaginary friend, next minute we’ve all gone BSOD for an undetermined time.” He glanced around the room and then did a double-take. “ _Literally_ blue screened in some cases, I see. Who ordered their tall skinny space viking with an extra shot of woad? And where’s Strange? We’re one arrogant bastard short.”

“Went back to Yarthe,” said the Leewit from the depths of the galley.

“Fewmets,” Loki swore, having unclenched his fists and opened his eyes and gotten a good look at the one with the others.

“He wanted to go and the Vatch eggered him because it wants us to help it somehow with the stones,” The Leewit went on, re-emerging from the galley with four more nutri-packs.

“Not _again,”_ Loki complained, still mostly to himself, “Three times in a fortnight is excessive, surely!”

“And… you’re … OK? With having this ‘vatch’ just grab him like that?” Bruce looked up at the Leewit, forehead corrugated with worry.

“Sure.” The Leewit tossed Bruce a nutri-pack, and then Peter, and then sent one each to Tony and Loki, aiming for their laps and getting the floor instead. Tony jerked away unthinkingly from the incoming missile, and Loki batted at his. “If the vatch hadn’t done it, I’d’ve had to,” she explained. “And three times for what, Loki?”

Loki took a deep breath, closed his eyes again, and shifted his appearance back to his preferred form once more. “Three times,” he enunciated, “that I have been forced to assume the form of a Jotun, since my alleged ‘death’ at the Titan’s hands.” He looked down at his own hands, and glared at a recalcitrant thumbnail until it lost its clawlike appearance. “I begin to believe that something in the realms of the vatches encourages the change.”

Tony and Bruce looked intrigued, but the Leewit shook her head doubtfully. “If you mean the time we eggered here to the ship, that was me, not the vatch.”

“You’ve said the creatures can … interact, with Egger space, however,” Loki countered. “Can you be certain that this time they did not?”

“And the third time was just now...” the Leewit bit her lip. “Was the first one right when you arrived on Yarthe?”

“Indeed.”

“Huh.” The Leewit made her way over to the nutri-pack Loki had batted away and worked it into one of her jacket pockets. It was a rather tight fit. “Vatch might be trying to tell you something, there. ‘Specially since it told me to work with a ‘cold witch.’” 

“Perhaps,” Loki said frostily, and then dismissed the topic with a flick of his fingers. “Come. We have rested, and we have eaten – or at least acquired the means to do so when we choose. Let us repair to the control room and see if we can determine anything of our current location and course.”

“Agreed,” Bruce said, trying to heave himself upright without engaging his sore ribs. Tony hurried over to help.

“Uh-huh,” said Peter, also on his feet but with most of his concentration bent toward squinting at the lines of symbols printed on the skin of the nutri-pack.

“Yeah,” Tony said, “but just for the record, I do not like this situation. I do not like how everyone’s head got fucked with, I do not like that Strange just disappeared, I do not like that our main sources of information right now are the two people with the least to lose if something happens to Earth. There is pretty much nothing I like about this situation at all except not being dead yet. And, being a genius, I assure you that this situation is going to be changed into one I like better. By me.”

Peter made a choking noise. Tony whipped his head around, irritated. “What.”

“Sorry,” Peter rasped. “Just got a mouthful of --” he waved the nutri-pack – “glg.” 

Curious, Bruce opened the spout on his own pack and took a cautious sip. He didn’t gag, but did grimace. “Like a white-bread smoothie with extra B vitamins. But slimier” he said. “I mean, I’ve had worse, but… not something to eat for fun.”

Tony snorted. “Now we’ve got that cleared up, let’s get our asses to the bridge. Lead the way, Gollum.”

^^^^^^^^^

The control center of the Eelnats model Q-13122 (“We oughta rename it. We stole it fair and square” “Shippy McShipface?” “No, Peter,” “I like ‘Bob.’” “No, Tony.”) would have been dazzling, properly and luxuriously fitted out as its designers had intended. Even in its current stripped down, military configuration, it had a certain Spartan grandeur.

Set as it was at the juncture between the torus ring and the docking square, the chamber took in nearly the full diameter of the ring, rather than the half- sized dimensions of most of the rest of the ship. Support structures like curved upside-down staircases framed an immense holo-screen – some seven or eight meters high.   
Long ranks of octagonal somethings on either side made a kind of aisle. The somethings had knobs and ports – perhaps they were meant to be fitted with smaller screens? Translation bugs? Comfortable chairs configured to one’s choice of alien anatomies? In front of the screen, far back enough that one could look at it without neck strain, a boxy table held what were probably the controls for the ship, or at least some of its systems. This table in turn was framed by two chunky, semi rectangular metal pods, which among their assorted attachments and protrusions were matched pairs of bars like handgrips. These pods depended from enormous, flexible-looking gantries hooked to the ceiling, and one of them had been placed a good meter higher up than the other.

Tony’s engineer brain measured the metal pods against the approximate heights of Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian, and concluded that they, too, served to control the ship in some way.

“Flight controls, I bet,” Peter said, on the heels of Tony’s thought. “Hey, you think I could learn to drive this thing?”

“Suppose we first ascertain our whereabouts,” Loki suggested dryly. “I suspect the vatch may have moved us.”

“On it!” The Leewit left off her speculative assessment of the curved supports and scampered up to the central table. She, started turning knobs and pressing keys, frowning. “Lessee,” she muttered. The Holo-screen lit up with a parade of blocky symbols. “Nope!” The Leewit told it cheerfully, “I sure _don’t_ want to ping the Titan’s headquarters right now, thank you!” She typed again, and the symbols disappeared and were replaced with something that might have been a design for a David Chihuly sculpture or an icon of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

“ ‘S a good map,” she said thoughtfully, “if only I recognized any of it. What about...” the muttering trailed off, then switched to a language that seemed to be mostly clicks and beeps. The image shifted, bent, then fuzzed out entirely. “Ah!” she announced, looking back over her shoulder at her audience, “Realtime viewscreens!” She stabbed a button triumphantly and the static resolved into coherence again.

“Dude,” Peter whispered, awed.

The glowing edges of the holoscreen faded into near-absolute blackness, in the center of which was a duller glow – moving clouds of dust, greenish and purplish. From time to time the clouds parted, revealing a smooth, rocky expanse of ground, rolling beneath them, dark brown. They were far enough from the planet – Moon? Asteroid? – that they could see the horizon edge, but there seemed to be no topographical features to speak of, only the passing shadows of the clouds – and where was the light source?

“Look familiar to anyone?” Tony asked, rhetorically.

“How high are we, compared to the surface?” Bruce mused. “And how good are these viewscreens? From the level of detail and the curvature I’d guess this place is… smaller than our moon? But larger than Rhea? If it were smaller than Rhea I wouldn’t expect the surface to be so regular.”

Loki’s face shone pale in the murky light of the holoscreen. “If the vatch has played true,” he said, “then Rhea would be the correct comparitor. And your irregularities should be coming into view quite soon… Ah. See there?”  
It looked at first like a long plume of cloud, jetting away from, perhaps, a volcanic source. As they neared, though, it was clearly a spar of land – a causeway wide as a continent, reaching out impossibly far into the void beyond it, striated with ridges tall as Everest. 

“How is that still attached?” Tony muttered, running calculations in his head, “Is this piece of space just so empty that nothing’s bumped into it yet?”

“I am quite certain that someone in Tivan Group could advise you on that topic,” Loki said, “But it would cost you dearly and we have other matters at hand. Leewit, we want the other hundred and eighty degrees in view, please, and then we must hope we can learn to steer this ship easily and without damaging it. This place is called Knowhere, and it has a number of unpleasant fates available to those who lack the means to escape it.”

Tony stepped up next to the Leewit. “I vote for me for pilot,” he said. “I have the most flight experience of any of us --”

The Leewit cleared her throat. 

“Overruled,” Tony shot back. “You were the gunner on the _Venture,_ not the pilot. And I have more experience than you do with flying unfamiliar machinery and learning really, really fast. And I think you’re too short to reach the controls, so… wow.”

The viewscreen had resolved into the retreating view, rather than the oncoming one. It was… impressive. The improbable geology of Knowhere was replaced by the blazing aura of an alien city, uncountable pinpricks of light shining out from under the spinelike causeway, curving … inward, not outward. The glow outlined a darker tangle of fibrous stuff that looked more organic than anything else, where the spine joined the orb, and behind it, a cavern the size of...

“That’s no moon,” Bruce murmured, “That’s a space station.” Peter offered him a silent fist bump in honor of his ability to quote old movies under duress.

With concentration, one could pick out miniscule individual lights, zipping in and out of the cavern, many of them following the spine outward or even settling here and there among its crevices. They must be ships, many of them the size of the Stolen Eelnats or larger. But the lights grew smaller as the ship and the station moved away from each other.

“Right,” said Loki. “We’re going in the wrong direction. Leewit, can you reverse the thrusters?

She frowned vaguely at the control podium. “Nope,” she said finally, but her hands moved anyway. “I can cancel the autopilot and bring up the near-atmosphere controls, though.” 

“Switch the view back to forward, too,” Tony directed. “I don’t want to have to Ginger Rogers this.”

“What?” said Peter.

“She did everything backwards and in heels,” Bruce explained.

The Leewit planted her fists on her hips and glared up at him. “Who says _you_ get to do anything?”

Tony pointed to the hanging pods. “Those the steering mechanism?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you reach them?”

The Leewit glared at him, shoved him backward a little, and took an experimental hop in the direction of the right-hand pod. She landed without touching it.

“Ipso facto oingo boingo, kid. Time to step back before I get nano-cooties on you.” Tony wiggled his fingers menacingly.

The Leewit subsided, glowering. “Beek-wok,” she muttered, but she stepped back from the platform and let the engineer take her place.

Tony planted his feet and settled his shoulders. “Alright,” he grinned. “Let’s take baby for a ride. Uh, maybe find something to hold onto or strap yourself into first, just in case.” 

“On it!” Peter announced, and started shooting webs.

“Good ide-mph” Bruce said, and Peter looked contrite. 

“Sorry, Dr. Banner, sir, I just wanted to make sure everyone has some neck support – didn’t mean to get your mouth.” 

Banner shrugged. “Mffpthm.”

“Thanks.” 

Loki had summoned up his armor. “Keep your potions out of my hair, if you please.”

The Leewit rolled her eyes. “Least you didn’t hang me upside-down this time.”

“Hey,” Peter complained mildly, and then Tony cracked his knuckles loudly enough that they all heard it.

“Alright, let’s do this. Oh, good idea, Loki.” Tony called up his own armor, thrust his hands up and out dramatically, and grasped the bars of the two steering pods.

There was a humming sound. From somewhere within the pods, bluish globs of something oozed down and englobed Tony’s hands and forearms. 

“Ew,” said Peter from his piece of wall. 

“Mpfhm frmm?” said Bruce from his.

“Neat,” said the Leewit.

“Quiet in the peanut gallery,” Tony said, his voice going softer as he began to concentrate in earnest. “We’re gonna start by assuming some basic bio-analogous mapping, and see where that gets us. So if I...” Tony bent his knees slightly and leaned back, pulling gently on the steering pods. On the holoscreen, the great ridges of the spine filing away beneath them slowed, then stopped, then slowly inched forward. “Yay,” Tony muttered, “now let’s see if we get ourselves turned around, shall we? Now, is one hand pitch and the other one yaw, or… oh, wait, here’s a set of buttons. Don’t wanna press them yet, they’re probably- OH SHIT!”

The holoscreen image blurred into vertical streaks and, the floor of the control cabin rotated upward beneath them like treadmill turned too high. Knowhere’s cavern city blurred briefly into view, with the spine appearing like a ceiling rather than a floor this time, and then vanished again as the ship spun. Loki squawked and Peter whooped.

“Stop, dammit!” Tony pulled down, hard, all but squatting on the platform. The floor stopped spinning but seemed to briefly drop from underneath them. “Why are you so fucking sensitive?” he accused the machinery, as he tried to pull forward with one hand and back with the other, and got a sideways jerk. He looked down at his own feet. “Oh, and there’s sensors in the floor too, huh? How’s that work, we playing DDR now?” He reached out with one foot and tapped at the edge of a square that had just lit up. 

The ship shuddered. “Think you maybe just opened fire on someone,” the Leewit suggested, and Tony bit back another swearword, and tried again to turn the ship on the x axis while keeping y and z stable. He got an erratic swoop and a burst of speed, but the cavern was at least in front of them again, and moving closer. Tony took a breath. “Eeeeasy...” he let his whole body go still except his hands in their alien globs. The ship accelerated slowly, too slowly to be concerning yet, though they’d have to course- correct to keep from crashing into the spine before they got to the cavern. “Eeeeasy...”

The ship made a blatting noise. Tony jerked, clenching his hands instinctively on the steering bars. The ship tilted leftward, then rightward when Tony tried to correct it. A little box opened in the lower-right quadrant of the display screen, then floated centerward, jiggling along with the rest of the view as the Eelnats rolled and swayed. An angry-sounding voice came out of the screen, making words Tony would swear he could almost understand, but not quite.

“Shoddy translation module,” Loki sniffed and raised his voice to answer the comm. “Our apologies; we are experiencing some minor pilot malfunction. We will correct the issue as soon as we can.”

“Think you meant _auto_ pilot malfunction, there, pal,” Tony breathed, trying to decelerate and correct their trajectory. Eeeeasy….

“I most certainly did not,” Loki snapped. “Also, with regards to the station’s internal gravity field and all the docking facilities, the spine points down. We will need to correct our orientation.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Tony snapped back, “As soon as the spine stops being the thing we’re about to _crash into!”_ More warning blats from the screen – three or four more boxes – were those other vessels trying to hail them? Also large, neon-yellow blocks of symbols and lines that looked like they might be other kinds of warnings.

“Forty seconds to impact!” the Leewit shrieked, “Down and left!”

Tony pulled, a lot harder than he meant to as the floor rolled sideways, this time. His boot repulsors engaged suddenly, putting the suit in flight mode and taking Tony out of contact with the bucking floor – kind of a mixed blessing in regards to trying to do anything useful with the steering pods. He kicked backward, trying to plank between the pods and keep his hands parallel. Some of the yellow lines vanished from the screen but some red ones popped up instead, something to do with the fibrous tangle around the spine. “I’m trying, I’m trying!” Tony yelled, over the Leewit’s shrieks and the roar of the engines. The ship rolled again, and then the spine fell away from them, which would be great except that more yellow lines appeared on the screen, which split abruptly into two views – forward and reverse views, all full of other ships trying to get hold of them, plus a few bright flares that looked a lot like weapons. Being fired at them.

Right on schedule, the hull breach alarm sounded again. “Oh, come on!” Tony kicked forward, trying to re-orient himself on the platform so he could pull on the brakes, and wrenched his shoulder as the ship tumbled.

“UP!” The Leewit yowled, “hurry!”

Heart pounding, Tony shifted his grip on the handles and tried to push them upward.

The engines went dead. In the sudden silence, the ship continued to tumble, the view zipping unpredictably past the screen, and then, while Tony mashed buttons and yanked at things, stabilized. The spine showed in front of them, pointing downward, as Loki said it was supposed to. They were, relative to it, rising steadily toward the cavern city, now visible only as a brighter glow at the top edge of the viewscreen. Tony took a couple of deep gulps of air and could hear his shipmates doing the same. Very, very carefully, he let go of the steering bars. Very, very carefully, he jetted back from the control platform. The blue goo retreated. The ship’s trajectory didn’t change. Behind him, Tony heard Bruce make a whimper of complaint. He turned around to face them.

Peter, hanging upside-down from one of the staircase struts, grinned at him. “That was awesome, Mr. Stark! How’d you manage to fix it so quickly?”

Tony rubbed his face, hard, and then his sore shoulder. The suit nanites pressed in around it, turning themselves into a compression bandage. “I didn’t,” he said, flatly. “I don’t know what did.”

“Comm chatter’s saying something about station security,” the Leewit offered. “Maybe they’ve got some giant version of the tractor beam they can use on runaway ships. If Peter’d let me out of these webs I could hop on the console and see if I could figure it out.” 

“Um.” Peter gulped. “Well. Uh, this formula usually lasts about two hours...”

“We will be reaching the docking port in approximately twenty minutes,” Loki informed them. “Perhaps one of you might be so kind as to help me retrieve my daggers? He tugged futilely at his restraints. 

“See, this is like, the exta-extra strength one,” Peter apologized. “The one I can’t break out of and that doesn’t cut. So… He made his own attempt to pull away from his spot on column. The metal buckled.

Tony rolled his eyes and started snickering. “OK, OK, let’s let Daddy Stark take care of this then.” He called up his gauntlet at its lowest-power, narrowest beam, and got to work on Bruce’s restraints. Entirely because Bruce was the nearest and not because he was Tony’s favorite. Really. He couldn’t do much about the gag, but oh, well. The air slowly filled with the crisp scent of burning polymer. One by one, his new team peeled themselves away from the wall (and, in the Leewit’s case, ducked out from under the bike helmet that was still glued in place), and shook out the kinks.

He waited to do Loki last. “Say please,” he suggested.

“Or I could simply do this,” One of Loki’s doubles said from behind him. Tony batted at it irritably.

“It will function well enough for most purposes and I can transfer my essence to it should it become necessary,” Loki’s double explained, smug. “But if you wish to bargain with the Collector for the possession of the Aether, it might be helpful to bring the person who has a few of the Treasures of Asgard in a looped transport spell, ready to hand,”

“You’re no fun,” Tony groused, and bent to cut the last few bonds. “Fine,” he said. Peter, stick with me once we’re out there. Literally if necessary. I can’t have you… You have to survive this. Loki…. Do whatever it is you were going to do anyway. I refuse to make your twisty mind my problem right now.”

“So very flattering, Stark, thank you.”

“Bruce, Leewit, you’re rearguard. You see something that worries you, just whistle.”

^^^^^^^^^^^

All in all, Tony thought, Knowhere looked like kind of a shithole. Definitely more of a _Firefly_ vibe than anything with “star” in its name except possibly _Starship Troopers_ . It was dark inside the hollow moon or whatever it was, with dim yellow lights shining out of windows here and there, but mostly from cracks in walls where two pieces of sheet metal didn’t quite fit together right, or holes in what had probably been machine parts before they were support braces for tumbledown shacks. Bulky, grimy figures tromped wearily or belligerently along the narrow footpaths, into or out of the few solidly-constructed buildings around the ships’ docking points. A few hundred yards inward and upward, another solid building, strung with lights outside as well as in, must be an entertainment venue; the humanoids on the balcony were much more brightly and scantily clad. There was a smell of dust and ozone and oil, and a constant grinding roar of something like jackhammers or concrete cutters. It was like the very worst parts of post oil-boom North Dakota.

Also there was a dog. In a spacesuit. 

It sat there directly in front of the crew of the Good Ship Bob as they made their way warily out of the loading bay, and it trotted up to meet them. A yellow lab, ordinary sized, in a white jumpsuit like the one Neil Armstrong had worn, only with an extra sleeve for the tail. And a Russian flag instead of an American one on the chest.

“Is that _Laika?”_ Tony whispered to Bruce, who, still muffled by extra-strong web formula, merely shrugged.

“Cosmo, actually, but I get that a lot,” the dog replied. And while Tony was still choking on his own spit, it went on, “That was the worst ship handling I have ever seen in all my time as Station Security here. I have seen better piloting from a cybernetic raccoon with a two-hundred-consecutive-jump hangover than what you just inflicted on me. You’re lucky I caught you before you crashed into one of the spine-trawlers; you damage our profits like that and it wouldn’t matter if you were stuffed from apex to nadir with adamantium sawblades. You would never buy yourselves outta here.”

Loki, predictably, recovered first. “My profound apologies, Stationmaster Cosmo. We are grateful for your intervention. I must admit, we are ourselves somewhat uncertain of the exact contents of our cargo, but if any of it strikes your fancy, I am certain a suitable reward could be arranged. And, may I offer congratulations for your recent… career change? I don’t recall you being in such an… important position the last I heard.”

Cosmo scratched at his ear with one white-clad paw. “Well, you know how it is,” he mused, “A little space radiation, lick a little dust off a few brain-miner’s boots, a zap from the Power Stone, next thing you know you’ve got telepathic powers to rival Ebony Maw’s. I don’t mind the security gig; it’s a living.”

“And it suits you well,” said Loki, spreading his hands magnanimously. As he straightened from his half-bow, he created a double. “Suppose you and my simulacrum have a look at the hold and discuss which of its contents might be salable, while the rest of us visit your master. Or are you independent from the Collector, now?”

“Nah, he always shells out for the good sausage. Have fun getting outsmarted.” Cosmo wagged his tail and led Loki’s double back into the Stolen Eelnats. 

Tony closed his mouth. He opened his mouth. “That was a talking dog.”

“Uh-huh,” said the Leewit. “I keep forgetting you guys don’t have those.”


	29. VERY Long-Term Investments

Nobody seemed to pay them any attention as they picked their ways through the alleys and up the staircases that led to the Museum. Loki had time to brief them on the Collector, though his focus was heavily on reasons why everyone should shut up and let Loki do the talking. Bruce and Peter would have done so anyway; neither of them wanted to come to the notice of anything older than their own solar system if they could help it. Tony spread his hands and said, “From what you’ve said, you’re the only one who’s got anything worth trading with the guy. Golden rule: you have the gold, you make the rules.” The Leewit said nothing, but she had her thinking face on, which was about as much as anyone would expect from her.

The museum was a strangely beautiful edifice to be found in the middle of the ramshackle mining colony: ten stories tall or more, a round dome supported by slender pillars and translucent panels that glowed pale gold. It looked like the love child of the Taj Mahal and the Tower of Pisa had gotten really into Heinlein in its teen years. Loki led them to the front entrance with his back straight and his cape swishing. Tony bulked up his own armor a little and brought down the helmet visor. Bruce, Peter, and the Leewit seemed more inclined to slink a bit, but each knew the other wouldn’t hesitate should a more active response be needed. (Bruce was really worried about this. Would the kids have the sense to stay out of the way of the Hulk? He picked nervously at the edges of his webbing bandage, trying to free his mouth for a proper breathing exercise.)

The museum’s interior seemed dimmer than its exterior; nearly all the light came from within the display cases that made a labyrinth of the floor and lined the walls like blue glowing honeycomb. Tony had been vaguely expecting something like the more embarrassing rooms in Stark Mansion, with fun-looking alien toys arranged on walls with labels, maybe whatever the galactic equivalent of signed treaties was, fancy pieces of furniture and clothes… this was more like an aquarium. Easily eighty percent of the illuminated shapes around them were clearly biological. Far, far too many of them were humanoid. And… moving. Peter gulped audibly. Tony ground his teeth. The Leewit’s lips pursed.

The voice that greeted them from the depths sounded exactly as a being of unimaginable age and unspecified powers ought to sound: cavernous and slow. “I already have a Jotun, thank you,” it said. A stocky shape emerged from behind one of the floor displays. He wasn’t – couldn't be – as imposing as his voice had been, but the monklike robes and controlled movements did something, and he bore up better under a nearly vertical hairstyle than most would have.

“None of us is for sale!” Peter declared staunchly, and Bruce put a steadying hand on his shoulder. He felt for the kid, he really did, and he wanted those cages gone too, but now wasn’t the time. Just before they got back to their ship, preferably after one of them had learned how to fly it properly. That would be the time for smashing. The Other Guy rumbled queasily in the back of his mind. Even for this, he didn’t want to come out. _You really getting into that much of a funk over one defeat? That’s… that’s_ puny, _hulk. **NO.**_ Bruce took a deep breath through his nose and forced his attention back to the negotiation between Loki and the Collector.

“I am sure your brother the Grandmaster would have sent his greetings, had he known I was bound this way,” Loki was saying. “When I last saw him he was in the process of addressing an attempted military coup.”

“The Grandmaster’s amusements are no concern of mine,” the Collector admonished. “What is it that you have brought me?”

Loki shrugged elaborately, “Only a few little odds and ends I managed to pilfer from Odin’s vault before Asgard fell.” He held his hand out flat, and a bejeweled casket materialized in it. Loki’s hand began to turn blue. He vanished the casket again. “That is one of them,” he said. “Also the Time and Life tablet, not that its contents would be of much interest to you, and certain pieces of jewelry from Frigga’s dower….”

“Not the Tesseract?” the Collector interrupted.

Loki stopped smiling. “No,” he said. “That is the other thing we bring: news. The Titan is moving. He has acquired the Gauntlet, together with the Power Stone and the Tesseract both. He will come here. Soon.”

“You lost the Tesseract,” the Collector said flatly, and Loki bristled.

“The Tesseract is lost,” he corrected, “Along with all the realm of Asgard, land and people both, and with them, possibly all the Nine Realms. Because Odin chose to gather power through conquest rather than alliance, and chose secrecy rather than trust, and by the time I began working with the Tesseract it may already have been too late.” Loki allowed a hint of desperation to show on his face. “The Aether _must_ not meet the same fate. The … entity … that saved my life when the Titan struck has reasons for preferring that the Aether be at the disposal of myself and my allies, and since these people –” he gestured at the little cluster of humans, “have two Stones on their home planet and are woefully underprepared for the arrival of the Titan, they are naturally interested in any advantage, however temporary.” Loki took a deep breath and pulled the Casket of Ancient Winters out of its looped transport spell again.

“The casket,” He repeated. “The Tablet. Freya’s necklace. Baldur’s sword. Space on the hold of our ship for any other items you might wish to be elsewhere when the Titan’s forces come to Knowhere. All for the _loan_ of the Aether. We will return it. But if you cannot accept those terms, at the very least, heed our warning and keep the Stone from the Titan’s hands. You can – “he swallowed and clenched his hands briefly around the casket – “You can have your Security Chief read our minds, if you wish, to confirm we speak the truth.”

“Hey!” Tony broke in, objecting, but Loki ignored him. “That is,” he said, voice gone from earnest to wry, “You may have him do so as soon as he has finished rolling upon the bale of flexi-gard textiles he found in our hold.”

The Collector steepled his fingers and lowered his eyelids, face otherwise impassive. “The warning is appreciated,” he intoned. “And your trinkets are… interesting. But I see no reason to allow the Reality Stone to be brought into a war zone.”

“Not even for a chance to obtain other Infinity Stones?” Loki fluted, and Tony interrupted again.

“Vision is not for sale, asshole!”

Loki sighed. “Your construct may negotiate for himself, Stark. He may be interested in an extraplanetary career. Nor is his stone the only one in… proximity. Particularly if the Titan comes for the others himself.”

“My brother is the gambler, not I,” the Collector intoned.

The Leewit’s voice, much softer than usual, was still startling in its contrast with the others. She’d made her eyes wide and her hair fluffy again. “If you do it our way,” she coaxed, “the witches of Karres will owe you a big favor.” She frowned briefly. “I mean, I’d need to get back to my own time, or at least send word, and you wouldn’t be able to call it in for a while yet, because there needs to be a Karres, first, but we can be pretty useful, sometimes.”

All the Collector’s attention was abruptly focused on the Leewit. Peter shuffled a little to be slightly in front of her. “A time-traveler. Interesting. And how long a … while… would I need to wait?”

She shrugged. “Ancient history isn’t my best thing, but… OK, there’s gonna be a plague that wipes out most of the hub civilizations before Yarthe gets that far. I’m not real clear on how much before. And then the Pathamites stop being a religious movement and start getting all… territorial… about… maybe ten gigaseconds after humans settle in the Hub? And Empress Hailie is the … eighteenth? I think? Ruler of the Hub empire that comes out of that? Anyway, the time the vatch pulled me from happens after Hailie starts her Royal Culture Progress trip, and the Daal of Uldune confirms that Sedmon the Seventh will be his heir. So… half a terasecond altogether, maybe? Not a full one, for sure..”

The Collector hummed deep in his throat. But whether the Leewit’s unusual offer would have been enough to tip the balance by itself, they would never know. In the next moment, a shiver ran through all six of them, and Cosmo’s voice barked in their heads. _Boss! Thanos’ ship just jumped into local space near the Theta beacon! We’ve got three hours, tops, before he docks in._

The Collector’s head snapped up. “You have my permission to interfere with the ship’s mechanics in whatever way you see fit.”

_I’m working on it, but there’s only so much I can do. Just be glad Maw’s not with him._

“Ebony Maw’s breathing vacuum, actually,” Tony piped up. “Courtesy of yours truly. Not to brag.”

_Three hours,_ Cosmo repeated.

The Collector straightened. The rolling voice was less suited for snapping out orders than it had been for the earlier negotiations, but it served. “Alert the evacuation teams,” he commanded. “Tell the Tooth Squad to prepare my yacht for Decoy Protocol. You yourself are to make our guests’ ship ready to receive the Priority Zero inventory, then debark. You will serve as my Factor with whomever the Titan brings into the city. Minimize damage, all uses of force authorized.” 

_Got it._ Everyone’s ears popped as the dog broke his telepathic link and got to work. Bruce flexed his jaw and tried again to stretch the webbing on his mouth. It shouldn’t take too much longer before it started to degrade noticeably, surely?

The Collector swept his glance around his domain and clapped his hands twice. “Get moving!” he called, and two or three untrammeled figures among the many caged ones started jogging about, presumably seeing to the safety of whatever treasures they were told to protect. Not even Peter imagined that the Collector would have told them to prioritize their own lives. Just as he was thinking that, the ancient eyes met Peter’s own. “You lot,” he said, “Make yourselves useful.” The Collector spun on his heel and stalked deeper into the museum.

After a few seconds’ hesitation, Peter followed him. Loki had already attached himself to a melon-colored woman in a rather skimpy uniform who had trotted through the door with a device that looked quite a bit like a pallet jack, except for the part where it floated in midair. Tony and Bruce looked at each other, shrugged, and fell in behind Peter.

Only the Leewit failed to get with the program. Something was bothering her very urgently. Her eyes darted from place to place, and her fingers twitched. “Wires,” she announced suddenly, to the world at large, “I need about twelve lengths of wire, thirty centimeters long, one-and-a-half to two millimeters thick, silver or copper alloy. Straight is better but I can deal with a slight coil as long as there aren’t any real kinks. Anything like that nearby?”

The museum staffers, including the new ones who had swarmed through the doors, ignored her. All around, display cells hissed open and precious artifacts were lifted carefully down to be suspended in some kind of gel matrix (more goo) in the octagonal containers. Nearly all the “live displays” were pressed up against their respective windows, watching. A few made pleading gestures. Some pounded uselessly (and silently) against the panels. Peter, laden with two of the packing octagons affixed to each hand, had opted to make his way back to the float pallet by walking along the wall, avoiding most of the crowds on the congested main floor. The upturned faces below his feet made him cringe, and he dithered to himself. This was wrong. This was so, so, wrong, but they had to get the stone away. Wouldn’t be any good rescuing these people just to let Thanos kill them and everybody else. And maybe they weren’t actually good guys in there? Maybe they were… famous… alien serial killers… or something? Maybe?

“Wires!” The Leewit repeated, urgently. “I swear, I can get us away from the Titan so fast his ship can’t follow. We won’t even ping the jump beacons. I can get us to Yarthe in two-three days, ship time, but I need those wires. Isn’t there anything in this clumping stinkhole place that doesn’t run on blue goo? Cosmo?”

_Little busy_. The mental voice this time carried a hint of a growl.

Peter caught a glimpse of Dr. Banner and Mr. Stark, below him, each carrying one end of one of the storage pods, and it gave him an idea. “Hey, Mr. Stark, do you think maybe your suit nanites could fabri-”

“NO NANITES!” the Leewit yowled. The glassy stuff under Peter’s feet vibrated.

Everyone still in the museum turned to stare at her. Loki set down the packing pod he’d been about to heave to his shoulder and bellowed in return, “Do shut up, child! Now is _not_ the time.”

“I’m gonna need them soon,” the Leewit insisted.

Loki inhaled through his nose, loudly enough to be heard above the general bustle, and closed his eyes. “Once we are aboard,” he said through his teeth, “I will help you cannibalize the backup water recycler. Will that do, you mewling brat?”

The Leewit blinked twice. “Oh, yeah, it would be an old-style one. ‘Course. Sorry, should’ve thought of that.” And just like that, she was calm and, to all appearances, cheerful again. “Anything I can do in the meantime?”

It took only a few more minutes before the crowd of Tivan Group staffers and their assorted loads of treasures had flowed out of the museum - now a much emptier place – and off to their designated escape vehicles. Bruce and Tony (Bruce in front, steering, at his own emphatic if muffled insistence) were guiding another pallet back the way they’d come, ready to stash it somewhere aboard the Eelnats. Peter, carrying two more pods that wouldn’t quite fit on the pallet, scampered ahead, and Loki, carrying nothing but with both his hands alight with magefire, stalked behind them, eyes on their surroundings, on guard.

The collector paused at the open door of the museum and turned to address the dozens of beings still pressed against the clear panels of their cages. “Be patient,” he admonished them. “Cosmo will attend to you when he is no longer wholly occupied by-” 

There was a sound: high, piercing, of nearly intolerable purity. The Collector’s hands went to his ears without a thought. The sound repeated, bouncing, echoing, and one by one the view panels of the remaining holding cells cracked. By the time the sound ceased, the Sakaarvian Oldstrong he’d kept in the third gallery had already broken out entirely and was assisting the Baluurian in the next case over. He took a deep, outraged breath.

The Leewit stepped out from behind the open door and looked up at him with a neutral expression. “Oops,” she said.

Before the Collector could take appropriate revenge, Cosmo’s voice howled in his mind. _Boss! You gotta get onto that ship and away, pronto! I’m risking getting mind-blasted before they land as it is!_

The Collector growled and clamped one gloved hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “You will get word to your people,” he growled, “and it will be a very. Very. Big. Favor.”

“Sure thing,” said the Leewit, “But let’s get moving. I wanna get my hands on that water recycler coil.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Tanleer Tivan. He only _just_ got the place all fixed up from that mess with the Power Stone...
> 
> We're past the halfway point now, folks. I'm writing the first draft of the last 2-3 chapters as we speak. (And it is taking. For. Ever. I feel like Achilles trying to catch up with Xeno's tortoise.)


	30. Newtonian Physics Optional

Luckily for all concerned, the Collector proved to be a more than competent pilot. Their takeoff from Knowhere involved no more fanfare than a humming noise and a vague sensation reminiscent of the first seconds of an elevator ride. The Leewit backed off a little on her previous bossiness and made no attempt to issue orders to their newest ally. She told him that she’d tinkered a little with the stolen ship’s basic ID ping signals but hadn’t gotten very deep, and then let him decide whether he wanted to do anything more about it while she went for her precious wires. 

She grabbed Peter on her way out of the bridge, and Loki followed them both, partly out of curiosity and partly because he believed they needed someone to keep them out of mischief. (So did Stark, but he had Banner.)

The first step was to find another ship interface besides the one the Collector was using to pilot. They located one in one of the two bunk spaces that had been at least nominally equipped for actual use – probably the Maw’s, since Loki recognized the Nyctarian meditation amulet suspended from the ceiling above the space where the bed platform would fold down, if the Maw bothered with such things instead of simply floating in midair. The Leewit had Peter hold her up on his shoulders so that she could reach the interface panel, then tugged him along through the corridrs to the workshop-like space near the hold that contained both the needed spare parts and the tools to do something with them. “C’mon, you and me can take it all the way apart. It’ll be neat.”

“You say that like there’s any way in hell I’d have a problem with that,” Peter grinned. 

The Leewit grinned back. “And once I’ve got the wire you can do whatever you want with the rest of it; it’s not plugged into ship power so it’s not like it’s gonna blow up.”

Loki reconsidered his willingness to serve as babysitter and shifted a little, restlessly. The Leewit craned her neck a little to meet his eye. “You’d maybe better take a nap or something, Loki,” she suggested. “I’m gonna want your help with another big klatha thing later, and it’s been a long day already.”

As much as he disliked receiving anything that resembled an order from a little slip of a mortal, Loki could only agree: it _had_ been a long day. There had been the breakfast strategy meeting, and then all that fuss about the Leewit and her fear of Stark’s nanites, and no sooner had that little incident settled down then they had all been summoned to Bleecker Street, and then the Vatch, and then the Collector… from his body’s point of view, they had to be approaching nightfall, now. A meal and a rest would both be prudent. And if Loki chose to augment his evening nutri-pack with a few savory tidbits his double had unearthed while taking Cosmo through the hold, no one else need know. Or expect him to share.

^^^^^^^^^^

Years of being on the run had left Bruce with an ingrained set of habits for those times when you could do absolutely nothing about the threats you were facing: eat, wash, take a shit, rest, or, if none of those things were possible, at least do some breathing. Since their stolen ship had facilities for everything except possibly the washing, and since young Peter’s webbing no longer blocked his mouth, he felt like he was in a pretty good place for the moment. If he could just convince Tony to do the same.

“Seriously,” he said, “The only thing you can make sure is in working order at the moment is you. Drink your alien smoothie and get your head down.” 

Their newest crew member (or captain? That was a discussion Bruce was happy to not have if they could avoid it) pulled his hands out of the steering blobs and turned to face them. The Collector’s spine slumped a little, making him look more human than previously. “We will have warning before any ship tries to approach us,” he assured them. “I mean to see to the items I had brought aboard and arrange them more appropriately. If you need to replenish yourselves, this would be the time.”

“I wanna pick your brain about the Reality Stone,” Tony insisted. “Does the container you have it in let you use it, or is it strictly for transport? Do we have any good data on the radiation it puts out? Does it fuck with people the way the Mind Stone and the Tesseract do?

The Collector graced him with a single narrow-eyed glance, then swept past Tony and out of the control room without a word. Bruce tugged at Tony. “C’mon. The kids found some bedding earlier; we can snag it and bring it up to the bridge, set up camp.”

Tony sighed. “Sleepovers with you used to be a lot more fun, Sweetums. Remember tracking the scepter? We had all that data to play with, and better food...”

Bruce rubbed his forehead. “I’m assuming this is Sweetums the muppet you’re comparing me to now? I… I don’t know what’s up with Hulk, but I at least need to rest a bit before I… before something else happens. Maybe… keep me company? You’re probably the best insurance we have if I have an… incident.” Well, Loki might be helpful as well, but Loki was off with the kids, stripping tech. And it was a face-saving excuse for Tony, if he wanted one.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Sure, sure, I’ll watch your back against all the big, bad aliens.” But Bruce thought he heard the smile his friend was hiding, and the point was to get Tony to do some self-care. As they made their own way back to the living area of the ship, Bruce let his mind wander. He needed a puzzle; something to occupy his brain enough to keep it off the potential horrors of the future, but not so urgent he couldn't stop if he managed to fall asleep.

“Hey, Tony?” he said, “Is it just me, or has Loki aged quite a bit since the invasion?” Getting Tony involved in the so-called “squishy sciences” was always kind of hit-or-miss, but it was the first thing that came to Bruce’s mind that might do.

His friend didn’t even turn around – merely contemplated the nearly solid wall of silver and gold nutri-packs that lined the galley. There were a few chinks in the wall here and there, scattered not-quite randomly. “You think maybe there’s different flavors of these things?”

Bruce shrugged. There might be. Or some geared toward Ebony Maw’s metabolic needs and others toward Cull Obsidian’s. They could ask the Collector or the Leewit or Loki to translate, he supposed. But he went on with his own preoccupation.

“I mean, it’s been a few years, sure, but we’re talking about a being with a five thousand year lifespan. You wouldn’t normally expect that to make much of a difference, but Loki definitely looks older to me. Or am I not remembering?

Tony’s shoulders twitched. “Being tortured and imprisoned and finding out your mother’s been murdered and having your home destroyed will do that to a guy,” he muttered.

Bruce flinched. There wasn’t anything he could say that wouldn’t make it worse. He wasn’t even sure about "sorry." He was tired enough that it was all he could do to suppress the lecture his more callous and pedantic side wanted to deliver about how, while stress could affect skin tone and hair retention, there were certain changes in body conformation and in cartilaginous features that really only happened with time, and so…

“Hey, are you guys talking about Loki?”

Peter poked his head around the galley entrance. “Isn’t that whole shapeshifter thing cool? Have you noticed how he gets younger-looking around the Leewit and me, like, lower hairline and less wrinkles and smaller ears and stuff, and then when he’s facing off against something like those guys on Bleecker Street he kinda gets a little buffer? You think he’s doing it on purpose, or is it, like, automatic? You think he’d tell us if we asked? Probably not, huh.” 

“Tony, where’d you find this one?” Bruce asked, amused. He hadn’t considered shapeshifting as an explanation for his puzzle. But really, age could be a kind of status marker – why not adjust yourself to the average in the room as a kind of… social camouflage? 

“Queens,” the other two said together, and Peter shouldered his way into the little galley. Bruce took a deep breath and edged back toward the door.

“Speaking of slippery alien bastards,” Tony said, losing interest in questions of biology, “and their teen sidekicks, what’s going on with Team Hogwarts? They kick you out?”

“No!” Peter protested, stung, and then admitted, “Well, sort of. The Leewit got her wire and then she told me I could do whatever with the rest of the water recycler, and I kinda really want to figure out what some of the other things in the ship’s workshop are, and I thought maybe you’d be into that too, Mr. Stark? And you too, Mr. Banner, sir, if you’re interested.”

Tony grinned suddenly, hit by a ridiculous wave of glee. For just a moment the mountainous weight of his many problems: the threat to Earth, the dubious nature of his few allies, his worry and exhaustion and squishy human feelings, none of that mattered in the face of the realization that he was standing in an extraterrestrial pantry. On an alien ship. In. SPACE. A tiny kernel of five-year-old Tony jumped up and down in his brain, explaining that this was the coolest thing _ever._ In the next second, though, Tony’s grin split into a yawn without his permission.

“We’re old men, Peter,” Bruce said, kindly sparing Peter any effort to be tactful and keeping Tony from dodging the issue. “We really do need to get our heads down for a while before tackling the contents of an unknown lab. But if you’re not tired, you could… grab something smallish and maybe take first watch? Worst case, you could probably get Tony out of the way if… if the Hulk decides to put in an appearance.”

Peter blinked hard. “You’re expecting the Hulk to show up here? Is he, like, an alien too? Does he have a ship or something? Wait. You _know_ the Hulk? Is that why you disappeared, did you like, get abducted and go off in the Hulk’s spaceship? That is so, so, cool!” The kid’s hands were shaking visibly with excitement.

Tony, damn him, thunked his head against a shelf-full of nutri-packs and snickered helplessly, eyes closed and shoulders shaking. Bruce took another deep breath, rubbed his hand over his face, and said, “Kid, I _am_ the Hulk.”

“You--” Peter gargled, and then just stood there, jaw and hands both hanging slack, eyes nearly bugging out of his head, for a full thirty seconds. Then he blinked hard again, shook his head, cleared his throat, and said, “I have so many questions right now.”

Bruce sighed again. “I can’t answer most of them. He… comes out… if I get angry enough. Or afraid. Or… well. Anytime the frontal cortex isn’t in the drivers’ seat, really. And I… I don’t remember, afterward.”

Peter cogitated for another few seconds, running a red-gloved finger over a stack of nutri-packs. “Wow,” he concluded, “that sucks.” He wondered just how that had happened, whether it had been on purpose or accidental. A part of his own brain that sounded a lot like Ned was squeeing hysterically about the knowledge that he had even more in common with his middle-school idol Dr. Banner than he had ever guessed. He couldn’t wait to tell Ned about this one. But no. They were in the middle of a really dangerous mission and Dr. Banner was counting on him, Peter, to keep Mr. Stark safe _(Squee!)_ if the Hulk… manifested and started smashing things. He should be calm and mature and practical. “OK, so… Hulk. Is he… How strong is he, proportionally? Once we get past the whole conservation of mass thing, is it all Newtonian physics from there, or does he have some kind of extra power boost?”

“Uh?” Dr. Banner looked confused.

“ ‘Cause I mean, I haven’t studied the Hulk footage in a while, but I don’t think I’ve seen him doing anything that would take more than, like, a hundred thousand Newtons? Is that right, Mr. Stark?” At his mentor’s smirking nod, Peter went on. “OK, yeah. I can deal with that, no problem. I mean, it might not be _fun,_ especially if I run out of web fluid too fast, but, yeah, I can handle that. Wrestle him, maybe tell some knock-knock jokes, see if we can get Loki to conjure up some puppies, something.”

 _“Handle it?”_ Dr. Banner repeated incredulously, but Tony was still smirking.

“Hulk,” he said, “Meet Spider-man. Who does have some non-Newtonian power boosts. I saw him and Captain McRighteous play catch with a tram car one time.” Tony’s face went gentle and his voice softened. “You’re safe, buddy. We can all get some sleep.”

“A tram car.” Bruce looked at the kid, who spread his hands, looking sheepish. “I think _I_ have a few questions, now.”

The boy’s face broke into a delighted grin. “Long as I can eat while you’re asking,” he said, and pulled another nutri-pack from the nearest wall. After a moment, he pulled one of the gold ones too. Hopefully whatever was in it wouldn’t be too toxic to metahuman systems and might even taste better.

The ship’s intercom crackled to life. “Attention,” boomed the Collector’s voice. “If any of you… lot… can explain why all of the ship’s navigational equipment has just ceased to function, please join me on the bridge.”


	31. Sheewash!

While the Leewit certainly had a point about exhaustion, Loki could not yet allow himself to relax completely. Either of the Midgardian men might decide on a whim to exact revenge on him for his previous exploits, the Collector was a reluctant and only intermittently trustworthy ally, and the Leewit… if she was serious in her promise to propel them across dozens of kiloparsecs in the space of a few hours, then she had access to powers the equal of the Tesseract, or knowledge to rival the Norns, or both. Or she expected to engage the services of the vatch. Loki was not sanguine about either prospect.

He would, however, admit that his physical safety was most likely assured for the next hour or two, and that he could at least allow his muscles, if not his mind, to disengage for a bit. Though it turned out the boy Peter was entirely capable of carrying the spare water recycler to the workshop himself, Loki nevertheless followed the two children in as though he might be of some use, and then looked about for a place to lurk.

The workshop was impressively, unnaturally tidy and pristine, like a sales display. The floor and tools all gleamed dully. No stray fasteners or batteries or microplugs lurked forgotten in crevices. The required warning decals all had crisp edges and bright colors, and they were the only adornments in the room. There were no rotating displays of classic atmo-fliers projected up in corners, no lenticular panels depicting the winking Frooti-Oati Triplets in among the checklists on the message boards, not so much as an amateurish scribbled cartoon of Admiral Honeytits on the side of the gas compressor. The implications for the way Thanos ran his army chilled Loki in a way that even his own memories couldn't. Torture was unpleasant, but this… this was just _wrong._

The cleanliness did mean it was safe to sit on the floor, though. Loki settled himself in the corner occupied by the fusion kiln and leaned back against its smooth bulk, letting his head loll and his eyes drift shut, resting one arm on his bent knees and the other on his belly. The children's voices stayed quiet and calm, even the Leewit's pro forma litany of swearwords taking on the rhythms of a work song rather than any expression of real displeasure. Given an absorbing task, Peter seemed to lose his manic restlessness and focus his energy instead into steady precision. It took the two of them mere minutes to access the central coil array and start pulling and straightening the wires the Leewit so wanted. Loki breathed, letting all his senses except the magical one dim.

The Leewit's voice grew sharper, more commanding, and Peter's footsteps scampered away. Loki let his mouth hang open a little, feigning sleep, and slowly relaxed his thigh muscles, letting his legs slide out from their bent-kneed pose and begin to sprawl. There was a faint clinking noise that must be the Leewit doing something with her newly obtained wire. She muttered under her breath, too low for him to make out the words. On the astral plane, there was a low swell of intent, not a summoning of power, not yet, but the preparation for it. Loki wondered if pretending a faint snore would be useful. 

Something small and swift collided with the instep of his boot – not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to jar him all the way up his spine. Loki closed his mouth with a snap, opened his eyes, and found himself confronted with the Leewit's cold gray scowl. “Quit it,” she ordered.

Loki blinked in genuine confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

“Back off,” the Leewit repeated, “You can help me next time when we're both better rested, at least I clumping well hope so. But you keep your mind to yourself until then or you'll drag us back and make everything all kludgy and we can't afford it. I'm already not as good at this as Goth without having to compensate for snoops. So until I can show you how to get _into_ the Sheewash pattern, stay _out._ ” She kicked his boot again for emphasis.

Loki nodded as if the warning had made sense. “As you will have it.” The Leewit had been remarkably helpful this day and he still owed her a boon. He could refrain from observing her ritual out of courtesy, if nothing else. He rose to his feet as gracefully as he could manage and betook himself from the room.

^^^^^^^^ 

He very nearly broke his promise. The swell of magic rolled out from the workroom with overwhelming suddenness. As it brushed against his own he felt it reaching out, catching like burrs, and he had to furl in quickly to avoid being swept along, so quickly and tightly he felt the snap. His ears popped. Another moment and the pull knitted itself away, as though a circle dance had divided itself up into a pattern of eights. Loki breathed out hard through his nose and kept his senses entirely on the material plane. He could imagine now how the mere act of observing whatever work the Leewit was engaged in could cause trouble. And he was greatly curious about how such a work might look from the inside.

He had seen only a little of the Leewit's variety of magic so far, but the… reactivity, the openness of it, seemed to be a consistent feature. The healing spell he would have worked on his own burned cheek, had the Leewit not taken over, would have been smooth and precise as a scalpel, layered and contained, designed to avoid any interference in the delicate process. An apprentice, had he had one, would have been allowed to observe from a distance only after they had built their own wards and walls, the support structure of their own powers. Collaboration was a matter of dividing and coordinating tasks, and among the more competitive mages the contents of those individual components might be carefully guarded secrets.

The Leewit's “klatha patterns,” by contrast, took collaboration as a given. When he'd complained about her channel buffers she'd clicked him into the deep structure of her spell as easily as a memory cube into a reader, or like those curious hardened polymer blocks Peter used to construct decorations for his room. They hardly counted as “structures” at all, more akin to the rhythm of a dance than to a solid wall or a blade, all but infinitely expandable, provided everyone in the link knew what they were doing. The casual trust such an approach entailed was… entirely unprecedented, in Loki's experience.

The Collector's irritated voice boomed over the intercom, too briefly for Loki to catch the meaning, and he berated himself for his failure. He must be truly weary, that he could not pay attention to more than one thought at a time.

Given this paucity of attention, he chose not to listen to the yammering intercom since it was doubtful anyone but the Leewit had anything useful to say. And in only a few minutes the magical pressure from the workroom dissipated as abruptly as it had arrived. Loki caught the faint tinkle of the Leewit's handful of wires hitting a hard surface from a minimal height. After another silent moment, he returned to the workshop.

The Leewit sat in the middle of the floor, red faced and sweat-damp, leaning on one splayed palm above the haphazard little pile her wires made while her other hand fumbled at them, trying to gather them up. It took her several long moments before she sat up, shook her head, and tucked her handful of wires into her jacket. When Loki cleared his throat, she finally looked up.

“Almost four and a half minutes,” she said, “not too bad, considering.” She pawed ineffectually at the bulging jacket pocket where she had previously stored Loki’s rejected nutri-pack. It did not appear to want to come out again. The Leewit sniffled.

Loki ran out of patience. “Here.” He strode forward and dropped to a crouch in front of the girl. He pulled out one of the candied lepti berries he’d filched from a stash in the hold, unwrapped it, and shoved it under her nose. 

She blinked owlishly.

“Come now,” Loki chided.

After another dazed moment, the Leewit accepted the sweet, chewing it determinedly and swallowing quickly. The sugar boost seemed to wake her up enough to make her next assault on her pocket more coordinated and successful. After gulping down nearly half the pack in a single swallow, she ran a hand over her face. “Sheewash drive really takes it out of you,” she remarked, and then yawned.

“So I see.” He watched as she pushed herself slowly to her feet, swallowed another gulp or two of her meal, and then just stood there, swaying gently. 

The intercom chimed again. “The instruments have restored themselves,” the Collector announced. “However, I would still appreciate an answer or two.”

The Leewit glared muzzily at the speaker. “Nosy,” she muttered. She finished off her nutri-pack. It took her another thirty seconds after that to come to a decision and pitch the empty bulb in the direction of the waste port, and when it missed she seemed to stall out again, torn between picking the thing up properly and just leaving it there. When Loki grew weary of watching her dither and teleported the little scrap into the incinerator himself, she blinked as if unable to assimilate this new piece of information. Loki huffed. The Collector was just going to have to wait for his answers, it appeared, until the Leewit recovered her wits.

“All right then,” he said meaninglessly, and hoisted the passive witch up onto one hip, guiding one of her arms around his shoulders and circling an elbow under her seat to keep her in place. She weighed less than an Asgardian field pack, though her legs dangled inconveniently. “Legs around my waist,” he directed, “And I’ll find you a place to take your rest.” The Leewit obeyed without a murmur – truly disconcerting.

^^^^^^^^^^

Everyone gathered on the bridge first thing next morning. Well. It might as well be morning, since everyone except the Collector had had at least a little sleep since their hasty flight from Knowhere. The Collector, being out of sync with the rest of them, looked forward to taking his own rest soon. He had, at least, had time to attend to his possessions and his personal hygiene since whatever it was the Leewit had done. When Bruce made his way up he found the room still empty, as their newest ally took care of his own mysterious business in the hold. Resigned to another long and confusing day, Bruce settled himself in a meditative posture and contemplated the displays on the immense screen. The tangle that Tony called “the flying spaghetti monster” that was probably a map was intricate and asymmetrical, not as aesthetically pleasing as a mandala, but it could serve the same purpose. Bruce breathed.

Peter came next, literally bouncing off the walls with excitement, carooming around like a ping-pong ball until finally snagging a hand on a protrusion and hauling himself up to perch on one of the upside-down staircases, too close to the screen to see it clearly, not that Bruce supposed it mattered when none of them could read it anyway.

“I tried one of the gold packs!” he announced brightly, “They taste even worse than the other ones – like raw liver wrapped in cotton candy – but my head is super, super clear now. They’re better than coffee.” The young face went contemplative for a moment. “Hope they’re not addictive. I probably should have asked the Leewit when she was reading the labels for me.”

Bruce winced. “Tell me Tony doesn’t know this,” he begged. Not that Tony with a caffeine withdrawal headache was any picnic to be around either. 

Either way, Peter didn’t have a chance to answer before Tony himself came in, explaining something at great length to the Collector, who steadfastly ignored him. 

“… so since it’s basically entropy in action – constant motion, constant change, trying to spread itself out evenly over everything, cooling it down to like, under a hundred degrees Kelvin seems like a viable way to slow it down and keep it contained, only what the hell would you insulate it with? The Stone itself is a bigger energy source than… well, pretty much anything except one of the other Stones, and how they haven’t destroyed our planet yet I do not claim to understand. So surrounding _that_ with deep space cold and not having it leak … well. And so the other idea I had was you could have a containment system that was also fluid – AI-directed nanites, say, that were designed to change and be changed by the stone and keep it busy, but always redirect it back to itself when it hit certain boundaries. Like Deadalus and the labyrinth both in one tidy package. Only the last time I tried to test one of the Stones for sentience it went really, really badly. Just, incredibly badly. You’d have to make sure your AI was incorruptible _and_ smarter than the stone, which, granted, isn’t the Mind Stone this time around, but...”

The Leewit ambled in behind them, mumbling a “g’morn” and finding an octagon to perch on, near enough to the podium that she wouldn’t have to shout. Tony interrupted his monologue long enough to say “hi, kid,” before he peeled off to greet his colleague and his mentee.

Loki waited long enough to make a proper entrance. He strode through the doors, boots clacking and cape swirling, nodded regally at the Collector, glanced casually at the screen, and then stopped dead, jaw slack.

“Tell me,” he said faintly, “that I am reading that map incorrectly.”

This was enough to make Tony stop buzzing and look up. 

“No,” the Collector intoned, “you are not.”

“We’re at the leading edge of the Shi’Ar empire.”

“Yes.”

“Five and a half kiloparsecs from Knowhere.”

Bruce and Tony both turned to stare. Peter straightened up from his crouch abruptly, standing stiffly and nearly upside-down on the underside of his chosen perch.

“You know your astography,” the Collector observed, condescending.

“And we did it without jumping.”

“So it appears.”

Loki sat down abruptly.

“As I said,” the Collector said, “I would appreciate an explanation.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Y’know, Sabrina,” Tony complained, “when we’re talking about how you can pull this ship along at fifty billion times the speed of light, ‘it’s a klatha spacedrive’ doesn’t even begin to cut it as an explanation.”

The Leewit glared at him. “I probably shouldn’t’ve said even that much in front of _you,_ Mister Nanite Carrier.”

“Oh, come on!”

“How do you _steer?_ ” Bruce interrupted plaintively, “you’d have to time it to the nanosecond to even get the right spiral arm of the galaxy.”

The Collector, who had been watching this byplay from an inflatable chair he had conjured up from his own belongings, stopped toying with the string of ancient Zewhoberri databeads in his hands and straightened up a little.

“You can’t, really,” the Leewit admitted. “Just straight lines. S’why Karres witches mostly don’t use the Sheewash drive to get to anywhere much, just away. But when you’re this far enough away from where you’re getting to, it doesn’t matter so much.”

The Collector hummed. “How often are you able to engage this… drive?

The Leewit rubbed a hand over her face, looking weary. “If I have to? Once every five or six hours. Don’t think we wanna try back-to-back for more than a couple days or I _really_ won’t be good for much for quite a while after, though. The Drive takes it out of you. Should be enough to get pretty close to Yarthe, though, depending”

“Depending on what?”

The Leewit grinned, sudden and sharp. “On how hot a witch Loki is.”

^^^^^^^^^

The designated “Sheewash room” was really one of the disused crew cabins. It was small, and the door didn’t even lock, but it did give the Leewit and Loki room to attend to their own witchy business without everyone else hovering over their shoulders, particularly given the competing attractions of the workshop. They stocked it with a carton of silver nutri-packs (“ _Not_ the gold ones, Peter, are you clumping insane? Last thing anyone needs after that kind of metabolic drain are stimulants to use you up even _faster._ ”) and Loki’s scrounged treats from the hold. Loki summoned his camping bedroll (wards woven into the blankets by Frigga herself, decades ago) from his looped transport spell.

“The main thing,” the Leewit instructed, “Is not to improvise. The pattern works just fine, but if you start tinkering it can get _strange._ Remind me to tell you sometime about what happened when Pausert thought he could fix the Egger Route.”

Loki snapped the bedroll open on the bare sleeping platform. “I may, on occasion, be somewhat contrary,” he sniffed, “but I am not undisciplined.”

“Good,” said the Leewit. “Let’s get started.”

^^^^^^^^^

“I hate magic,” Tony grumbled. “I really, really hate it.”

This time the screen blanked out for nearly ten minutes, during which Bruce meditated, Tony and Peter theorized far ahead of their available data, and the Collector, to all appearances, napped. When the screen woke up again the spaghetti monster map had once again changed shape. The Collector squinted at it. “Twenty-five kiloparsecs this time. Interesting.”

^^^^^^^^^

“You are quite right,” Loki enunciated around a mouthful of nutri-pack goo enhanced by half a dried pepper, “it does take it out of you. I believe, however, I can suggest some improvements.”

“Hm,” said the Leewit. She had snagged the entire box of Lepti berries and tucked it under one knee, where neither Loki nor anyone else could snitch any. She’d _missed_ Lepti berries these last few megaseconds.

“It is meant to be a group enchantment, is it not? Is there a maximum number of participants?”

“Not really,” the Leewit mumbled, still eating frantically. She’d seen the Sheewash done in groups numbering in the thousands, for really big stuff (like the planet Karres.) Of course, with that big a group, everyone who wasn’t at the working theater was running around cooking and changing the bedsheets to deal with all the hungry, exhausted witches afterward. Not that Loki needed to know any of that.

Her new partner tilted his head a little and lowered his eyelids. “It seems,” he began, faux-casually, “that by adding additional mages one could also improve the directional controls, by having different workers choosing different anchor points for the inertial cancellation vectors.”

“The what?”

Loki paused, a pickled meklah halfway to his mouth. “You’ve learned this pattern entirely by rote, haven’t you? You’ve not the least notion what any of its components do, only the whole.”

The Leewit shrugged and nodded.

Loki smiled. “Well, then, I can _certainly_ help you improve it.” He took another bite.

^^^^^^^^^

Neither magic-worker had responded to intercom hails, so Tony and Bruce cautiously palmed the door open and peeked in.

The place was a mess. The floor was littered with nutri-pack wrappers, the Leewit’s boots, and other, less identifiable detritus. Loki’s helmet sat on an upturned crate and the Leewit’s jacket hung from one of the horns. Loki had attempted to settle on the bed platform, but was too tall for it; instead, he slumped against the bulkhead, half sitting, his knees partly drawn up and his head sunk to his chest and his cape draped over him. He might have had room to find a slightly more comfortable position, had the Leewit not wriggled herself under his knees, and wrapped herself around the godling’s shins like a large toddler with the world’s boniest teddy bear. One of her bare feet stuck out from the side of the bed. Neither so much as stirred when Bruce knocked on the doorframe.

“I refuse to find this cute,” Tony announced quietly.

^^^^^^^^^

Six minutes. Fifteen kiloparsecs.

“Looks like we’re holding steady at about one and a quarter kiloparsecs per minute per witch,” Bruce observed distantly.

“Identifying a pattern is not the same thing as making it make sense,” Tony muttered, tapping away at Peter’s phone, which he was in the process of re-programming – either to make a more comprehensible interface with the ship’s computers or possibly just to keep himself busy.

“I get that back eventually, right, Mr. Stark?” Peter asked querulously from the workbench.

“I’ll get you a new one,” Tony responded. “No way I’m letting your pal Jed see what I’ve done with this one until such time as he is actually under contract to SI and I don’t have to worry about competition from an individual who still thinks pizza rolls are food.” 

^^^^^^^^^

Four minutes. 

The supply of nutri-packs in the Sheewash room had run out, and so the room’s occupants had joined everyone else in the galley for once. They both looked tired.

“Is there any reason,” the Collector inquired, “that we could not also utilize the jump engines, between Sheewash runs, if any convenient ones are available?”

“Nah.” The Leewit attempted to yawn through her nose so she could keep chewing. “Just don’t let yourself finish up too close to the hub. Anything less than halfway out to the rim and you spend too much power trying not to bump into things.”

“Not if you haven’t falsified the ship’s ID beam,” Loki warned. “We did steal it from Ebony Maw, after all; a mistimed jump ping might encourage all sorts of untoward events.”

“Those will come regardless,” the Collector said. “Eventually.”

^^^^^^^^^

Twelve jumps.

The two children and Loki had repaired to the hold for physical exercise, having elected not to Sheewash again as soon as they woke up this time. But they still talked of nothing else.

“Look,” Loki said, chinning himself on the digging bit for a mining bore that hung in the orange gloom, “at _best_ you are putting at least three quarters of your energy into directing the last quarter to take the shape you wanted it to. It is as though you were filling a cup by pouring water on a table, then squirting more water at it to make it drip where you wanted it to. No wonder you overheat.”

“I _know_ that!” The Leewit snapped. She kicked up into a handstand, hooked her knees over another strand of orange, pulled herself upright, and began to tightrope along it.

“Well,” Peter interjected, pausing in his ricochet flips long enough to defend his friend, “If magic is the only way to shape magic, she kind of has to do it that way, right? Not like you can make a pitcher out of water, or a pipe either.”

“You can make them out of ice,” Loki pointed out.

There was a silence.

“Show me,” the Leewit demanded.

^^^^^^^^^

Three minutes, twenty kiloparsecs.

“We are approaching the outer orbits for the star Sol,” the Collector announced. “Make ready your communications and your weapons.”

Two jumps.

Friday’s voice chimed over the intercom. “Good to hear from ya, Boss!”


	32. The Battle's Gonna Start Any Minute Now

For the second time in his life, Tony Stark had an Infinity Stone in his lab. That was all that mattered.

The Collector didn’t matter. Whatever twisty set of calculations had gone through the old man’s mind, (probably not a _billion_ years old, Tony wasn’t buying that, but there was no reason to call the guy on it,) whatever had led to him being willing to let his treasure out of his sight, those didn’t matter. Tanleer Tivan, the Collector, had released the Reality Stone into Tony’s temporary custody, along with all the accumulated information the Collector had on said stone, including the schematics of the cosmic pokéball that currently held the thing in check.

Peter didn’t matter. Whatever punishment Aunt Hottie considered appropriate for stowing away aboard an interstellar ship in the middle of a school day, it was keeping the kid out of further trouble. There wouldn’t be a repeat performance when the Titan arrived, provided they kept him out of New York. (Peter had accepted the news with equanimity, being more concerned with the text message from his buddy Ted that read, “MJ knows. Sorry my b.”)

Poor, long-suffering Rhodey-bear didn’t matter, and neither did anyone else who might be staying at the compound, and neither did any of the bargains Rhodey might have had to strike regarding them. Tony hadn’t even asked. Those would be, eventually, problems for Iron Man. Tony was Iron Man, but Iron Man was not all of Tony, and right now, Iron Man didn’t matter.

All that mattered was the deadline: yesterday, or better yet last year (wasn’t it always?) and the project: make a tool that would contain the Reality Stone in such a way that it could be used in battle. Tony worked well under pressure, and inventing was what he was. He had invented a blanket fort with a built-in vending machine when he was four. (Twice – he’d done the same thing again when AIM hit him with a de-aging ray once.) He had invented when he was a plutocrat and when he was a prisoner, when he shared a bed with a new partner every night, or with Pepper, or with no one at all. Tony, the essential inalienable Tony, invented. And an inventor was what was needed right now.

 _This,_ he thought, meaning all of it – the work and the need and the satisfaction and the looming, infinite, stakes, _this._ And then the words faded from his mind entirely, replaced by numbers, and shapes, and weights and textures in his hands, and he worked.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A little huddle of black-clad humans waited at the entry port of the Stolen Eelnats, accompanied by a striking, plum-red figure in a cape. The Collector greeted them with silence and a raised eyebrow. “Greetings,” the caped figure said, while the humans looked around, wide-eyed. “I am called Vision; we spoke earlier over the communicator. This man next to me is Phillip Coulson, director of a planetary security organization called SHIELD, and these other humans are his selected agents. When discussing the upcoming battle, you generously offered to oversee communications and surveillance from above, and to see if you could scramble the Titan’s frequencies as well. You requested a crew of assistants, which we are hereby providing. Agents Fitz and Johnson here,” Vision gestured stiffly at one male and one female within the huddle, “Are particularly adept with new forms of technology.”

“Ah.” The Collector nodded and stood aside with a bow. “Good. We will begin. And you, Vision, you intend to join us, yes?”

“Only temporarily,” Vision replied. “We hope my processing power may assist in your preparations. However, it is deemed unwise for me to take the Mind Stone too far from protection, and when battle is joined, I will be needed on the field.”

The Collector gave the spokesbeing a long, evaluating look. “Are you a device, then, powered by the Stone?”

Vision stared back, unblinking. “I have uploaded such details of my creation as we are comfortable sharing to your databanks, for review at some other time. It is theoretically possible that my existence could continue without the Stone, but we have devised no certain means of achieving this, and, necessary to my existence or not, the Stone is mine to guard.”

“Interesting.” The Collector dropped the subject in favor of leading his new group of minions onto the ship’s bridge. But that did not mean he had forgotten the subject. He would, eventually, wish for the Mind Stone to join his Collection. And Vision the synthezoid was also... unique...

^^^^^^^^^^^

Bruce was dithering just outside the door to the Hulk Tank when they cornered him. Loki and his little blonde shadow blocked his way to the rest of the gym, standing in oddly identical poses: feet at shoulder width, hands on hips, heads tilted, eyebrows raised. Bruce eyed them back warily. He wasn’t quite sure what he thought of either of them, really.

With Loki, he at least had a few memories of working with him, on Sakaar and in the aftermath. Enough to know that working with the man was possible. Free of whatever had driven him when he’d last appeared on Earth, Loki seemed sane...er, and he’d certainly fought on the right side in the Battle of Bleecker Street. Unlike Tony, Bruce believed Loki when he said nothing would induce him to work for Thanos again. He’d recognized too much of Loki’s body language before his supposed “death,” when he’d gone fawning up to the Titan, pretending to have been working for him all along. Bruce had learned that kind of placation at – or, more accurately, across – his father’s knee. He knew exactly what kind of things hid themselves behind _that_ mask. But none of that said anything about what Loki might do ten seconds after the fight with Thanos was over.

The Leewit was even more of a puzzle. In those first few days in the Sanctum and then the compound, Strange, Vision, and Rhodes had each independently offered an assessment that amounted to “not actively malicious and we don’t know how to get rid of her.” Tony seemed inclined to like her, but Tony also treated her more like a new toy than a person.

As to the girl herself, she seemed…. Cheerful? Most of the time, anyway. She reminded Bruce of Thor, in a weird way. The tiny blonde, like the enormous one, greeted all the weirdness and politics of Avengers-adjacent life with a sanguine equanimity, backed by a deep-seated confidence that she was capable of handling whatever came at her, whether she understood it or not. With the notable (and worrying) exception of the incident with Tony’s suit, she’d asserted her needs and abilities without either apology or belligerence, seemingly as confident dealing with the ancient Collector as with young Peter. Bruce hadn’t spent much time around teenage girls since…ever, but surely the Leewit was unusual?

And then there was her attachment to the mad god. Was that because they were both magicians? Because, as Loki said, he owed her a favor? A carefully hidden teenage crush? Was Loki simply the most entertaining thing in the room? Bruce hadn’t a clue. He cleared his throat. “Was there… something you guys wanted?”

Loki continued to loom. “Your Berserker self refused your summons, when we fought the Maw and Cull Obsidian.” His voice was soft, even, entirely neutral.

“Yeah,” Bruce admitted. He twisted his fingers together. “He did.”

“Is he within you still?”

Bruce nodded. “I still hear him. But he’s… I was going to test –“ he waved a hand in the direction of the Hulk Tank. “I mean, I can’t tell if this is something to do specifically with the Titan and his Horsemen, or if… this is how it is now. But… when Maw had me, he said… apparently when I transformed after you ‘died,’ the Other Guy got his ass handed to him. It seems to have thrown him for a loop. Always, before now, there was a pretty clear division. Anger for him, fear for me.”

Loki looked thoughtful. The Leewit jerked out of her pose, eyes wide, looking instantly five years younger. “Oh!” she exclaimed in a tone of sudden enlightenment, “It’s a brain injury!”

Bruce blinked at her. “What?”

“I kinda had the idea that Hulk was something you picked up somewhere,” she said, “like a case of chumpox. But he’s a part of your head that’s split off from the rest of you somehow, huh?”

Bruce dropped his face into his hand, shaking his head a bit and trying not to – well he didn’t want to laugh or cry right now, but he wasn’t sure which one he wasn’t doing. “That’s… not… wrong,” he finally managed.

“Huh.” The Leewit’s eyes looked vague, and then she stepped forward and put a hand on Bruce’s elbow, looking up at him flirtatiously though her eyelashes. She uttered a liquid, musical string of syllables that made no sense at all to Bruce, ending on an upward note as if the nonsense had been a question.

Bruce pulled back a little. “Uh?”

Loki had stiffened, his jaw tense and his eyebrows drawn together. “She said,” he advised, “that she thinks she knows a way to re-mesh the two sides of yourself. In the manner, she says, of the two halves of a tooth-tape pull-tab fastener – Leewit, did you mean a zipper?”

The Leewit blinked and seemed to come back to herself. “Uh-huh,” she said, “that’s right.” She looked back at Bruce, any trace of the… whatever it had been in her expression before… completely wiped away. “It might not be real comfortable right at first,” she said, “and you have to want him back; you can’t just hope he’ll go away for good and leave you in charge. But I’m pretty sure I know how to do it now.”

 _“Now,”_ Bruce repeated, incredulous.

Loki twitched. “Banner, I do not recommend this course of action.”

The other two both looked at him, Bruce startled and the Leewit hurt.

“Oh?” Bruce asked.

Loki’s mouth tightened. “I doubt you wish to allow anyone into your mind at this time. If you do not wish to fight as the Hulk, you can, perhaps, borrow some of Stark’s armor, or join the communications team aboard the Eelnats. Now is not the time to put yourself at risk.”

The Leewit stamped her foot. “S’not like that! Whaddaya think I am, a telepath? It’s his _brain,_ not his thoughts. Just a couple blocked connections that oughta hook up together, really.” She frowned at Bruce. “Brains are tricky,” she admitted, “but they’re pretty flexible. I don’t figure I can hurt you too bad even if things go wrong. If you don’t get fixed, you just go on like you are. Nothing worse. Promise.”

Bruce wanted data. He wanted certainties – provable ones, not the emotions of one slip of a girl. He wanted… oh, but he wanted her to be right… and if she wasn’t? If the Hulk won? Hulk had lived for two years on Sakaar and done pretty well by his own lights. If the Hulk was what was needed… if it meant Bruce could stop running, stop looking over his shoulder…

“Let’s try it,” he said, and palmed open the door to the Hulk tank.

“I will not assist you with this, Leewit!” Loki warned.

“S’fine,” the Leewit said absently, following Bruce through the doorway, “With everything you showed me about the channel buffers I oughta have plenty of juice without.”

The door banged shut again, thick and tight as any spaceworthy airlock, if not more so. Loki stared at it in a kind of panic, and then spun toward the gym exit. “Friday!” he commanded, “Friday, summon Stark, immediately! Someone else is in the Leewit’s mind, and now she’s alone with Banner!”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Bruce made sure the Leewit saw the escape routes, if the Hulk came out at his worst. He made sure he had the stretchy pants on. He made sure Friday was recording. And then he sat down cross-legged in the middle of the floor. 

The Leewit stepped up in front of him, completely at ease. “You just gotta relax as much as you can,” she said. “S' alright if you're nervous, just don't try and… think too much, OK? Your body already has klatha in it, you know, and it won't let me hurt you much worse than a headache. And it shouldn't take more than a few minutes.”

“OK.” Bruce closed his eyes and breathed deep. If this was the end, he told himself, then he went out choosing to trust, for once, in a spirit of curiosity and hope. If this was the end. He let the air out and took in another breath. And if it wasn't, maybe, maybe… He breathed, consciously relaxed his muscles, starting with his toes, then his tucked-up ankles, his crossed shins, his bent knees… 

The Leewit's cool little hands came to rest on his temples. He relaxed his thighs, his glutes, his lumbar spine…

His skin prickled. His heart beat faster, and faster yet, he took a deep breath and it was too deep, and his skin was too tight and his bones ached and the roaring in his head grew louder and louder, _NO!_ His shout was already too deep in his wide green chest.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“What the hell were you thinking??” Stark demanded as he scooted into the gym, all his armor in place save the faceplate. “Why didn't you stop them?”

“I never imagined Banner would agree!” Loki hissed, summoning up his own helmet and daggers. “I've no notion what is riding along with the little witch, nor how powerful it is. I didn't wish to provoke it unneedfully!”

An agonized bass NO sounded through the reinforced door of the tank.

“Well, sounds like you did an awesome job there,” Tony spat. “Friday, get us a visual of the inside of the tank. Audio too.”

“Sure thing, Boss!” the AI chirped, and the screens above the treadmill bank lit up with different angles of view of the Tank interior.

The two men watched the screens, openmouthed. The Hulk was very much present and accounted for, to be sure, but he wasn't… doing anything. The Leewit, or whoever was in charge, had perched on the roof of a rusted-out VW Bug (one of the lame ones from the 90's) that Tony had had delivered to be available for smashing, and seemed to be watching him. The big guy held out a hand in front of his face, wiggled his fingers. “It's … me,” he rumbled. 

“Uh-huh,” the Leewit agreed. She hopped down from the Bug and made her way over to the little cache of sports drinks and protein bars they kept in a corner for whenever Bruce came back down from a Code Green.

“It's … all of me,” the Hulk said, and then his lips moved silently and rapidly, as if he were trying to recite something in his head. “It's...” he blinked. Since when did the Hulk blink? That was a Bruce gesture. “Wow,” he said, “Thanos really did kick my ass. Yikes.”

In the gym, Tony and Loki looked at each other. “The hell?” Tony said, cogently.

“She said… she could fix him,” Loki replied blankly. “I never imagined she meant it.”

“You feeling OK?” the Leewit mumbled around a mouthful of protein bar.

“I… yeah,” Bruce said. “Yeah, I really am. Nothing's green… except me. Everything's… small and…” he chuckled, “puny-looking, but...” he winced. “Oh, Christ. I just went and octupled my daily living expenses, didn't I?” And then he sat back down again and started chuckling.

“Friday,” Tony said, “open up an intercom line and patch me through.” At her acknowledging beep, he cleared his throat. “You all good in there, big guy?”

On the monitor, the Hul- Bruce glanced up and then grinned outright, directly into the camera pickup. “I'm fine, Tony. I'm, Jesus, I'm _terrific!_

“Good for you,” Tony said flatly. “What was the first present I ever offered you?”

Bruce's smile softened a little. “Blueberries,” he said gently. “Aboard the helicarrier. And Loki, if you're still out there, when I put you halfway through the floor that time and called you a puny god, your eyes turned from blue to green, and I'm sorry I wasn't … together enough at the time to realize what that meant.”

Loki closed his eyes briefly. “I forgive you,” he said. Then he gave his shoulders a shake and straightened up. “Now. If you would be so kind as to bring the Leewit out with you, I should rather like to have a word with her. Immediately.”

“Sure,” Bruce said, “Just a sec.” And with balletic grace, he spun around and brought one green fist down on the engine block of the bug. “SMASH!” he shouted, and _giggled._

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Loki didn't even wait for the Leewit to make it all the way out the door before he seized her under both armpits and lifted her up to face level. “Who!” he bellowed. “Who is in your mind with you, Leewit?

“Ow!” The Leewit stuck a finger in her ear. “Patham’s seventh hell, what's got into you?”

Loki shook her. “Do not attempt to deny it, child. _I saw._ Your entire demeanor changed and you lost your English. Who has you?”

“When?” The Leewit asked, and after a moment, “When did you see?”

“Moments before you went into the Tank with Banner,” Loki croaked. “When you made your offer to heal him.”

“Ohhhh.” The Leewit grinned, cheekily. “I was worried there for a minute, but it sounds like you're just talking about the Maleen pattern. Gothy said Pausert had trouble with that one too, first time he saw it.”

“You-” Loki shut his mouth with a snap and pressed his lips together. He plunked the Leewit down on the seat of a stationary bicycle and stepped back, arms crossed. “I think you had best explain,” he said in a calmer voice.

“OK.” The Leewit looked up at the ceiling for a moment, twiddling her fingers and kicking her feet against the side of the bike, and then looked back at her audience.

“So,” she began, “Karres kids go Roundabout. Pretty much as soon as they can start doing real klatha, most of the time. We poke around our home towns, and then we go hunting and camping in the wildlands, and then other towns, and then other planets. Or not always in that order, depends what's going on and what you're interested in. But we go Roundabout and we don't know where we'll end up when we do. Well, you can't 'zackly have grownups following you the whole time; that would miss the _point._ And you can't know which klatha patterns you'll need ahead of time, no matter how good a premoter you've got. And you don't want to lug books around, and besides, it's really dangerous to try a klatha pattern you're not ready for yet. But you can't just send some little kid out with _nothing_ either.”

The Leewit spread her hands. “So what we do is copy a teaching pattern of an older witch's mind. Someone who's good at the same kinds of things you're gonna be good at, usually a relative. It's not the whole person, just the part that uses klatha. It's just a learning tool. It sits in your brain, and when you're in a situation where you might need do do something with klatha, it opens up any patterns that you might be able to do at that point. The pattern knows how much power and control each spell needs, so it doesn't give you anything you can't handle, and it doesn't clutter you up with things you don't need. And that's about it, really,” the Leewit concluded. “The better you get at klatha, the more the teaching pattern gets absorbed back into your conscious mind. My pattern's from my big sister Maleen and it's pretty much all the way absorbed now, but not quite. In another year or two it’ll all be gone and I'll be ready to buckle down to adept-level studies and stay in one place for a bit.” She looked a bit dubious at the prospect.

Her audience absorbed this lecture. Bruce looked curious, Loki suspicious. Tony wanted to get back to work, but couldn’t help weighing in. “We checked you for implanted memories your third day here, kid. Why didn’t this pattern show up?”

“Dunno,” the Leewit shrugged. “Maybe it’s ‘cause its’ procedural memory, not temporal? S’not a… a compulsion or anything, the pattern. Just gives you some things you can do and then you decide if you’re gonna do them or not.”

“Maybe that’s it...” Tony looked Bruce up and down. “I think I’d better add a grip to the Reality Staff if I want both you and Smurfette to be able to hold it,” He announced. “Friday!” He turned toward the door. 

“A… staff. That would have been good to know before now, Tony!” Bruce called. His eyes followed the retreating engineer and then darted back to the two magicians.

“You just… let them into your head,” Loki repeated, slowly. The concept seemed to give him a surprising amount of difficulty.

The Leewit snorted. “Sure! I mean, _your_ family gets in _your_ head, and you don’t even have a ‘specially good one.”

This, for some reason, made Bruce laugh. Loki pinched his lips together. “Even a child deserves some privacy from their elders.”

“Privacy?” The Leewit looked confused, then enlightened. “Oh. It’s not that kind of connection. The real person doesn't, y'know, _hear_ anything from the pattern, like they do with touch-talk. You just have a few memories that aren’t yours. They aren’t even memories of things _happening.”_

Loki stared gravely at the Leewit for a long few seconds, evaluating, then visibly cast the issue aside. 

“Well,” he said briskly, “It does explain why someone of your skill and power has such an _abysmal_ grasp of basic theory.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Viz had better watch out; he's got the Collector's attention now.


	33. Aaaaany Minute...

The Leewit had never been part of an army before. She’d fought plenty, in skirmishes and brawls, in kidnappings, hijackings, and ambushes both given and received. But the closest she’d ever come to something this organized was the Karres attack on the Worm World, and even then she’d been plunked into the middle of it by a vatch and missed all the organizing part. (Bad luck for the vatch, that had been; it had managed to piss off both Pausert and Toll.)

She didn’t even have the Great Patterns of Karres for comparison. Any time the adepts gathered in the Karres Town Amphitheater to do something big like move the planet again, the Roundabouters made tracks. The last thing anyone needed at a time like that was a bunch of half-trained, half-controlled klatha going off in spurts and upsetting the balance or distracting the witches.

She was in an army now, though, and she didn’t like it.

It was like all the most uncomfortable parts of a camping trip, mixed with all the most uncomfortable parts of an Empire transit station during a pilot strike. Clumps of tense, grim-faced people were scattered across the cracked hardpan that made up their chosen battlefield. Loki and the Collector were in agreement that they had, at most, a matter of days before the Titan made another play for the stones on Yarthe. The only reason he or his minions hadn’t showed up again since last week must be that he’d gotten a bead on the Soul Stone and gone to fetch it first. Neither informant held out any hope that the Soul Stone’s protections were any more adequate to the task of stopping him than those of its siblings. Once the Titan had that Stone, there would be nothing to stop him from coming to Yarthe and no reason to delay. (The Leewit would have waited until the Yarthians got bored and lazy and went home again, but Loki assured her the Titan didn’t care. He would throw his numberless soldiers at the humans until he got what he wanted, because for all the vast armies he commanded, he cared for, at most, five other people.)

It made sense, the Leewit supposed, to choose an expanse of nothing like this as the place to lure in an alien invasion – it wasn’t like the dust was going to care what happened, and apparently “Area 51” was an expanse of nothing that was still easy for the local military to supply adequately, ringed by bases and little towns and convenient staging areas. But there were no trees! Nothing higher than a semi-truck to climb. To say nothing of the heat. Or the food – the so-called Emmarees were possibly even worse than nutri-paks. 

Or the clothes. “Don’t even start, Leewit,” Bruce warned when the Leewit first emerged scowling from the back of the quinjet, wearing the gray, hooded bodysuit he’d shoved at her. “You shouldn’t even be here. You should be up on the Pirate Ship with the Collector and SHIELD, and the only reason you’re not is we know the vatch would override us if we tried to keep you there. But you are not going to the front lines without gear. Count yourself lucky Tony didn’t put you in plate armor.”

“Quite right, too,” Loki agreed absentmindedly from the corner he’d staked out. “That fabric, I am given to understand, will resist both blades and projectiles without impeding your movements unduly. Your appearance is a secondary matter, at best.”

The Leewit thought this admonition would have carried a lot more weight if Loki hadn’t been busy tweaking his own armor, solely for the appearance of the thing. He’d added iridescent scaled shin guards to the boots, painted gold highlights on the vambraces, and now was constructing some kind of vest or cloak to drape over his leathers in lieu of the cape he’d employed previously. Four needles moved industriously and independently, edging the olive-green wool (the Leewit suspected it of having been a liberated army blanket) with black cord while Loki attended to the fussier work of placing the spiky fur collar. (The fur was, according to Bruce, who said he didn’t want to know how, or why, from a creature called a porcupine, and the individual hairs were large enough and hollow enough to make a faint rattling sound when they moved.)

The Leewit cleared her throat.

“Quite,” Loki said, without looking up from his work, “but _this _is_ necessary._ I have, at one point or another, been the enemy of nearly every being on either side of the coming conflict, with the possible exception of yourself. If I don’t change the shape of my garb enough to prevent immediate recognition I’ll be too busy fending off personal attacks to get anything done.” He brushed a hand over the quills of the collar and clicked his tongue in satisfaction. Anyone who grabbed him by the neck in _this_ battle was going to regret it. “Whereas _you_ need only avoid being trampled on until or unless your vatch informs you otherwise,” Loki concluded, leaving off with the cloak and instead starting to tinker with his helmet, and that just went to show that Loki didn’t know anything about vatches, but the Leewit didn’t argue with him.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“So to summarize,” Agent Johnson said, her eyes on the display screen, “you suppressed the ID pings for the ship but didn't actually change much of anything.”

“There was very little time,” the Collector repeated. 

“No, no, this is awesome. This makes my job so much easier.” She wriggled happily and cracked her knuckles.

“W-watch out for mult- mul- uh, extra passwords,” Agent Fitz warned.

“Duh,” said Johnson, “and unless we get real lucky it's only gonna give us a few minutes to mayyybe half an hour past portal time before Mr. Big tries to Facetime one of his boys, and then it's too bad, so sad, time to run for our lives. But that should be all we need.”

“I… fail to follow your train of thought,” the Collector admitted.

“The log gave us Ebony Maw's last message to the mothership,” Agent Johnson explained, fingers flying across the keyboard she'd jury-rigged into the control podium. “Acquired Time Stone, Cull Obsidian damaged, missing, pinging locator.” So as far as they know, Ebony Maw is still on or near Earth, tracking down his brother and maybe giving some backup to the other Horsemen who went after the Mind Stone. And here's Ebony Maw's ship, right where it's supposed to be: in Earth orbit, all ready to plug into the main array when stuff starts going down. Which gives any pirate types who might have stolen the ship an extra in when we try to take down their systems. There's bound to be failsafes, but the more time we have, the more of them we can work around before someone notices and tries to take us out.”

“And when that moment hits,” Agent McKenzie added, “those of us who've been working on the weapons system get cracking and buy more time. If we're insanely lucky, it'll be as much time as we need.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A sling-ring portal opened at the door of the cockpit. “Never fear, Tony’s Here!” that worthy announced as he stepped through, followed by Dr. Strange. “The Reality Staff has been completed, courtesy of yours truly plus the schematics we had from the Mind Stone staff, and you’re welcome for revisiting _that_ traumatic period in my life, by the way.” Tony appeared in his usual lab uniform of ratty jeans and rattier tee-shirt, but the nanite housing glowed on his chest, and he brandished a long gold-colored staff with a rounded end and a thick, textured grip halfway up from the middle. Tiny red lights chased themselves in sequence through the tracery of patterns running along its length, and the sphere set into the rounded end glowed. 

Everyone, including Strange, backed up a pace or two. Tony, smirking, laid the staff across two adjacent seats and glanced around the jet. “Oh good,” he said, when his eye caught the Leewit. “It fits. I mean, it should, I had Friday measure you before we started fabrication, but you’ve been having a growth spurt, so there were concerns.”

The Leewit continued to glower. She ran a couple of fingers under the top edge of the face hole in the hood, chasing the few itching hairs that had gotten plastered to her forehead and trying to shove them back. “Do I really have to wear this all the time until we’re done with the Titan?” she whined.

Tony looked back at her, dead serious. “Unless you can demonstrate that you can get it on in thirty seconds or less.” He spread his hands, placating. “It won’t be too bad – the fabric’s antimicrobial and it wicks moisture. It won’t get as hot or stinky as you’re probably worried about.”

“But I still have to get almost naked every time I have to pee,” the Leewit groused.

Bruce snorted. Tony blinked. “No,” he said, “The zipper goes all the way to...” he paused. “Shit. Sorry, yes, I guess you do have to, at that. I wonder why the Widow never said anything? I based this design off hers, for the most part...”

Loki glanced up from his tinkering. His helmet had shrunk down to a circlet with guards over the temples, the horns reshaped to curve backward rather than forward. “Fear not, Leewit. There are tools available for those of us who lack a built-in downspout.”

Bruce did a double-take. “Do you not...” he began, and then stopped. It was, he realized, really not his business. 

“Only intermittently.” Loki replied, running a finger along a horn and curving it forward again. “Shapeshifter, after all.”

There was a pause. Strange closed his eyes briefly and opened them, and padded over to the open hatch of the jet, squinting out into the bright desert.

“Ooookay then!” Tony chirped, “I look forward to misusing that information at some future time. Meanwhile, I got something else for you, kid. For after the fight, but I figured I’d better give it to you now.”

The Leewit edged closer, eyeing him doubtfully. Tony reached into his back pocket and pulled out… Peter’s foan. The Leewit recognized the Darth Tater decal on its heavy-duty protective case. The case had acquired a new decoration, too: a clear, marble-sized, hemicylindrical bubble on the back of the case, just below the camera. The Leewit looked at the foan as it sat in Tony’s hand. Tony cleared his throat.

“So,” he said. “So. I know we figured out that my suit nanites aren’t related to the plague nanites in your time. Or if they are it’s like humans and naked mole rats. Not close enough to be useful in any way. But. Just in case we’re wrong…” he tilted the foan case a bit so the light caught a tiny silver bead floating in the bubble. “They’re encased in acrylic,” Tony said. “No power source, no connection to Friday or any other AI that could direct them, no way out unless someone teleports them. Which, I hear that’s a thing Karres can do if they want. The phone’s programmed with all their base code. Not the control commands; didn’t have the space for that, but enough to see how they go together and come apart. You’re getting the whole phone ‘cause I figure you’ll need some kind of interface and I have no clue how to talk to far future computers, but in a pinch you could just pull the SD card: Peter showed you how that works? Good. Anyway. If we were wrong, and if having your plague’s primitive ancestor around to study turns out to be a help, you’ve got that now.” He stretched his hand out, the foan flat on his palm.

The Leewit’s stomach squirmed with nerves. She knew now, she _knew,_ that that teeny silver bead stuck to the back of the foan couldn’t hurt her. But it was like knowing the yellow zap mites didn’t bite like the red ones did. Knowing didn’t _help._ She didn’t think she’d have felt safe even with that foan (and Tony) encased in one of Pausert’s ridiculous overbuilt egg-cocoons. But she wasn’t a baby anymore. And Karres witches did what had to be done. “Thanks,” she said, and took the foan.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

They had a plan. They knew what the bad guys were after, and could make it happen at a place, if not a time, of their choosing. They had some solid intel from Loki, and back up from most of the enhanced community, plus the US armed forces on the perimeter. (Ross was going to be insufferable, but if things went sideways he'd have to share the blame, too.) They had the Leewit. They had a Hulk. They had a chance. Up until now, the rule had been to keep the two stone-bearers at least twenty miles apart, so an ambush of one would not threaten the other. Now that they were as close to ready as they were going to get, the rule changed. The best thing to protect a Stone from the Titan, everyone figured, was another Stone. And dividing the Titan’s forces didn’t make much sense either. The more they could keep the attack focused on their chosen stretch of wasteland, the better. If the Titan won, he would almost certainly either destroy or take over the planet, because that was what he did. But the Stones would be his first priority. If they got rid of the Titan before he got the Stones, there was a chance.

So Vision and Strange and the holders of the Reality Stone tried to be within sight of each other at all times. Loki kept the Staff; he’d handled two other stones already and knew, insofar as any of them did, what he was doing. But Banner stuck close, learning what he could and serving as a safety net. If Loki’s grip on Reality faltered, literally or figuratively, the Hulk could stop him. Or take over. Tony avoided them all; possibly for safety, possibly because of whatever political things Rhodes had him doing with the leaders of the other teams, possibly just because he didn’t get along with Vision’s girlfriend. The few people who might have gotten him to answer the question knew better than to ask.

The Leewit circulated among them, poking her nose in one place or another until she got shooed away again. Since Vision was deeply occupied with his girlfriend and Strange was still holding a grudge about the Egger Route thing, this meant she spent about half her time with “Big and Little Green.” They were the most interesting ones anyway. Bruce kept trying to practice various martial arts forms he was used to doing in his smaller body and finding it rough going. Loki fiddled away with his new armor decorations: he’d just added a bunch of red jewels to the helmet and tabard “to match the staff” and added an elaborately worked belt. If the Leewit hadn’t been able to sense the amount of klatha he was adding in the decorations, she would have thought he was worse about clothes than Maleen. As it was, she made a try at the cooling charm he had set in his leathers to help make her new jumpsuit bearable. She wanted to be able to wear her Karres jacket on top of it. It was all she had with her of home. _And_ it had _pockets!_


	34. Go Time

The Leewit had about thirty seconds' more warning than everyone else, because for the first time in days, she relled vatch. Big Bossy had mostly stayed out of range once they'd left Knowhere, but now it loomed in close, ready to do who knew what, and make sure the Leewit kept her end of the bargain – always assuming she could figure out what it wanted. Loki spotted the Leewit tugging her hood up over her hair and triple-checking her pockets (she'd acquired a utility belt with more pockets in it, along with her Karres jacket) and pulled his new tabard off its improvised coatrack and over his shoulders. His hair braided itself tightly against his head, the extra length folded into a pad at the base of his neck, while he fastened the belt over all and reached for his newly reshaped helmet. The horns curled like a ram's, now: less useful for projecting magic but better for insulating himself against power he took from elsewhere. 

Bruce and Strange had both turned to look at Loki but not yet responded when Friday's voice chimed over the comms. “Portal activity detected in low-earth orbit, two klicks from Pirate Ship. All combat personnel report to stations. Cl. Rhodes, Veronica is prepped and the Hulkbuster armor will meet you at your location in approximately ninety seconds.” Rhodey, the newly arrived Captain Marvel, and a very few others would fight from orbit, slipping through a portal if they could, speeding to whatever coordinates the Pirate Ship gave them if they couldn't, keeping the Pirate Ship safe and picking off smaller vessels. 

Bruce spared a moment to send good wishes their way as he hurried to the rendezvous point, Strange keeping pace easily with the Hulk's best lope. He could see Vision streaking toward them. A gust of wind sent a sudden chill up his spine, far too cold for the Mojave in mid-morning. He glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of Loki, all gussied up in his new gear, the Leewit scampering behind him. Loki's skin was cobalt blue. His red eyes met Bruce's brown ones, and he lengthened his stride to catch up. “Wow,” Bruce said.

“I will spare no magic for vanity that I might instead turn toward this battle,” Loki vowed.

“Clumping drama queen,” the Leewit panted, catching up with them at last.

One couldn't exactly have front and rear ranks when your enemy might be arriving anywhere within a few square miles, but the different groups and teams waited, spread out and tense, while Friday kept them updated. “Looks like we've got five or six of those little Q ships like the one we borrowed, and… goodness me, that's enormous! The Titan has brought his main command ship, that makes the Q-ships look like lifeboats. Pirate Ship is still undetected, patching into their communications now… They've locked into the Stones' signatures and will be entering the visible atmosphere in t-minus thirty. Projected Epicenter near the Stone-bearers, as predicted.”

On the ground, the earth's defenders stirred. Somewhere out on the perimeter, earnest soldiers were programming the anti-aircraft drones and arming missiles. Bruce recognized Cap some fifteen or twenty yards off, standing next to… was that the Black Panther? Huh. Bruce knew Tony probably felt otherwise, but he couldn't be anything but glad to see Steve there. The swirling blue portal formed, maybe a thousand feet in the air above them. Cap raised his shield up in one hand, and bellowed, “Avengers! Assemble!”

The fliers took to the air, circling in toward the portal. Tony groused over the comms. “Oh, he did _not_ just say that.”

“That was a weird battle cry,” the Leewit observed, gaze flicking about, “What are they supposed to resemble?” The Leewit, Bruce remembered belatedly, didn't have an in-ear com or mic. Nobody wanted to risk the wrong whistle taking everyone out.

“Do not tempt me into answering that,” Loki muttered. He had strapped the Reality Staff to his back, easily accessible but not a weapon of first resort. Bruce flexed his own hands. If they survived this, if they had more time, he might look into what kinds of weapons it might be useful for him to have. Today, unless he needed to take the Staff from Loki, he would stick with what he knew.

^^^^^^^^^^

The first wave were mostly Chitauri. They came boiling out of the sky in almost exactly the same formation as they had in the Battle of New York, nearly a decade ago, but this time they met an army and a desert, not a startled city. The first Leviathan fell to a ground-to-air missile strike, the second to a searing beam from Cyclops, who took off his visor for a moment to look it dead in the eye. 

Most of the Terran forces took cover, though, or stationed themselves at the perimeter. Loki had told them how to beat the Chitauri; it was a job for their space-based fighters. Everyone else just had to stay alive, save their energy, and deal with everything else Thanos was going to throw at them.

_Norns bless them,_ Loki thought, watching the skimmers ranging over the ground, looking for targets and not finding them, _they listened._ He and Banner and the Leewit had crowded into one of the larger so-called “foxholes” on the ground, one devoid of a roof but wide enough to fit the Hulk. Loki cast an illusion above them, so it appeared to be a good-sized chunk of Leviathan carcass. 

The comm chimed. “We have OP on the Chitauri mothership.”

Loki cued his own comm. “If it is not guarded directly by Thanos' command vessel, it is a trap,” he warned, “meant to assess and draw out our space forces.”

And they had very few space fighters – barely a guerrilla cell, by Thanos' standards. 

“No duh.” The answering voice was Captain Marvel's. “We're not morons.”

“Royal we,” Loki muttered, but he did not cue the comm when he did so.

Three skimmer teams approached their foxhole, having decided that the illusory lump of leviathan carcass would make good cover for them. Loki dug an elbow into Banner's side. “We can't let them get close enough to touch,” he hissed.

The Hulk straightened from his crouch and planted his feet. “I've got the two on the right,” he hissed back, “Ready, set...”

Loki sprang, daggers out, to the top of the leftmost skimmer, while Hulk shouldered into the one in the middle, knocking it into the rightmost hard enough to shatter the relay crystals and send both vehicles up in smoke. Loki's two chosen targets were dead before the blast wave threw them all clear. The drivers of Hulk's two burned with their vehicles, the gunners were all but flattened by the blows the green berserker rained upon them.

The Leewit, sensible creature, had ducked further down into the foxhole and waited for the other two to join her.

“We'll need to move soon,” Loki warned them. “I'm veiling us for now but the skimmers will have alerted Command when they were destroyed.”

“Got it.” Banner stretched up and peered out over the field. “Looks like Iron Man and one of the guys I don't know are picking off skimmers,” he said, rather uselessly in Loki's opinion, since anyone could see the distant pops of exploding skimmer engines. “Vision and Scarlet Witch have a dome shield up and are staying behind it. They're getting mobbed but anything that makes contact with the force field is getting fried, so I think they're OK. There's some guy out there zooming around and throwing up walls of – it looks like ice? It isn't stopping the leviathans but it's helping against the ground troops. I don't see Strange – oh, wait, yes I do; he's just above Vision's shield and attacking that swarm from the outside… _Jesus!”_

“Is _he_ here? The Leewit shrieked, possibly out of surprise, possibly to make herself heard in the cacophony.

“Some big robot-guy just threw a little yellow guy straight into a leviathan's mouth!” Bruce reported. 

“Not our problem!” Loki snapped. “We need to move.”

“Right,” Bruce said, absentmindedly shifting his weight as the Leewit scrambled up to ride on his shoulders. Maybe the little yellow guy had been AIM. Bruce was mostly OK with the idea of an AIM goon getting himself eaten.

^^^^^^^^

“Hey,” the Leewit called as they jogged along, “You think any of these guys have an all-units signal on their comms, or would that just be the leaders?

“Anything like that would be topside,” Loki shouted back, “Why?”

“First time I fought alien invaders,” the Leewit replied at the top of her lungs, “I got a chance to whistle on the all-units line and broke the whole fleet. It was mostly robots, though.”

“Must have been solid-state engineering,” Loki declared, which was not the weirdest thing Bruce had heard anyone say while running for their lives, but still. “The Titan's units will be gel matrix, as with the steering blobs aboard the ship.”

“Too bad,” The Leewit roared, and clapped her hands over Bruce's ears to whistle at an approaching line of foot soldiers. The whistle ended with a series of cracks and their weapons stopped glowing and started emitting white smoke from the power cell casings.

A leviathan above their heads gave a great bellow and dove toward them. Bruce and Loki stopped in their tracks and switched direction, running back toward its tail, angling too sharply for it to be able to turn and catch them. The creature ignored them, ignored everything, to crash writhing into the ground. Loki plucked the Leewit off Bruce's shoulders and rolled her to the ground, too, dodging the flailing back end. A trailing fin edge clipped Bruce across the chest, knocking him backward.

As he got to his feet, the creature's eye burst outward in a viscous gush of stinking fluid. Something glimmered, and a moment later the little yellow-clad man, now naked to the waist and covered in assorted bio-hazards, wriggled his way through the rip. Bruce heard him growling to someone who must be on a different comm channel. “No, Sike, you do not get to call me Jonah.”

Bruce bit back a snicker. The little guy slid down the fallen leviathan's cheek and hit the ground – somehow without ever losing hold of the fistfuls of bright knives he kept in either hand. “Not Ishmael either. Shut your fuckin' yap and tell Kurt to bring me a beer.”

Loki tugged at Bruce's elbow and pointed. “That way's clear for now.”

The Leewit vaulted back onto Hulk's shoulders and they took off again.

^^^^^^^^^

“Mark time,” Friday's voice chimed, “Twenty minutes since the first portal opened.” Bruce rubbed a hand across his forehead. These things always happened so fast.

The cleared area Loki had spotted was covered by a thin, slippery layer of frost and, at first glance, dotted with more alien footsoldiers, except none of them moved. Loki sent a double to investigate. “Frozen solid, all of them,” he reported a moment later. “The ice worker must be a powerful one. If we remain still amongst them, we might pass unnoticed for a time.”

The Leewit slid down Bruce's back. She peered into the haze as if to get a better look at them, not that it could do her much good at the moment. “They dead, or just frozen?”

“I neither know nor care,” Loki informed her.

“Huh.” She edged a little closer to the nearest group of statues and whistled.

They went off like bombs. Bruce roared with pain as the icy shrapnel flew around him, stinging like bees where it cut his hide. Loki summoned up some kind of shield spell. Dr. Strange swooped down momentarily to check on them, then took off when Loki waved him away.

“Not dead,” the Leewit had flattened herself on the ground and turned her head sideways to deliver this information. “Must've still had a liquid core to 'em to go off like that instead of just falling apart.”

“You lackwit!” Loki shrieked, “Those were our cover!” And the vultures were circling already, drawn to the sudden signs of action in a previously quiet quadrant. Loki drew his daggers and stood with his back to the Hulk’s, trying to make ready.

The All Units signal beeped again. The voice this time was not Friday’s lilt, but the West Coast drawl of Agent Johnson. “We got target lock on the Chitauri Mothership. Ground troops, it’s time to not be under a whale in ten, nine, eight...”

Loki and Banner hurried to join the Leewit on the ground. Loki cast a shield dome of minimum compass and maximum deflection around them.

The roar of the falling Chitauri legions shook the earth and clouded the already hazy air. The Leewit whistled at another ice statue – more gently this time – and watched the ice fall away and the body within collapse in the dirt. Her two guardians (yes, she knew that wasn’t their main job, but still) propped themselves up cautiously on their respective elbows, then slowly got to their feet. Thanos’ troops were well-trained. The non-Chitauri invaders wasted little time before going on the attack again, and the portal throbbed, spitting out new horrors.

The Leewit stayed on her belly. Whistles were all very well, but she wanted a proper gun, and the Chitauri had just dropped a whole lot of them. She started to slither forward.

Loki hauled her to her feet by the back of her jacket. “Stay. Put,” he hissed. When the Leewit spun around to argue with him face to face, he clamped his hands on her biceps and lifted her a couple of feet in the air.

It wasn’t enough to stop her arguing, of course. “I wanted a gun,” she said.

“You want _discipline!_ ” Loki shot back. “You are with the stone-bearers. Your role is to conserve your strength and engage as little as possible until the real powers are on the field. And instead you stray from your partners, call attention to our hiding places, and behave like an idiot!”

Bobby Drake, starting his second sweep pattern across the battlefield, spotted a tall, thin, creature in an outlandish costume grabbing a tiny figure in a dark jacket and lifting her into the air. He veered sideways, sweeping near enough to get a precise shot. By the time he realized that the girl’s uniform had been gray, not yellow, and that Kitty was still phasing through alien tanks in Sector Tango, he’d skated away again, and the blue-skinned, red-eyed monster had been frozen solid. He hoped that other girl was OK.

^^^^^^^^^

“Time to not be under a whale in ten, nine, eight...” The entire crew of the Pirate Ship, even the Collector, chanted along with Agent Johnson as they watched their warhead zero in on the Chitauri mothership. It had been a goddamn signal ballet; getting that to happen, Iron Patriot and the Veronica satellite and Friday and the pirate ship, all of them code-shifting in different syncs to dodge Thanos’ scramblers and send the coordinates where they needed to go. Iron Patriot still hung out in the blackness, hopefully out of range, nearly invisible amid the flash and roil of the topside battle, guiding the payload home from a distance. When the viewscreen lit up in a thousand colors, some of them real, some of them enhanced depictions of other radiation spectra, the room erupted in cheers.

The cheers turned to a collective gasp when a text box cut across the screen, stark white letters on a black background: “IRON PATRIOT TAKEN CAPTIVE.”

Coulson swore quietly to himself in four different languages. “Switch the view to Iron Patriot’s camera and HUD,” he directed. The Collector, at the display controls, nodded, and the viewscreen flickered. 

Tony’s Bleeding Edge armor, at maximum power, had been helpless to counteract the force of a single tractor beam. Iron Patriot, enclosed within Hulkbuster, was now suspended between three, from three little scout ships in close formation, towing it inexorably toward Thanos’ vast command vessel.

The view from the helmet showed the vessel growing larger and larger, until it was a wall, a cliff face of a size to dwarf the grand canyon, a void of dull metal instead of stars. Within the expanse, a portal slid open and grew larger. Coulson cleared his throat. “Friday,” he said, “Send orders to the suit. If it loses contact with us, it has to self-destruct.”

There was a silence on the bridge. They all knew Stark and Rhodes would both agree – no matter how primitive Tony’s tech was compared to the galactic standard, they couldn’t afford to have it stay in enemy hands. Fitz closed his eyes and sniffed as the signal went dark.


	35. Getting Real

The appropriate local colloquialism, Loki thought, was “thrown for a solid loop.” Until the blast of cold had robbed him of the need, he'd not fully realized how much of his personal energy went into maintaining whatever form he wore. It had been constant: an unconscious allocation of flesh to task, an awareness of space and one's own occupation of it, of boundaries one must not exceed and one's own compliance with them. And then the ice-worker's power had solidified all the water pockets in his body, changing the familiar honeycomb mesh of himself into something much stronger and stricter. He felt abruptly powerful. And trapped. Pure surprise kept him locked into position for a time, as if being frozen solid were some kind of impediment for a Jotun.

Before he could acclimate himself to the obvious changes he learned of another one. A solid-state Jotun body amplified sound. The discreet murmur of of the comms in Loki's earbug buzzed through his flesh, resonated alarmingly in his chest and his nasal passages, and boomed out across the desert, distorted, but still understandable:

_...to team Tango Thirty-Six for Evac. Patient had bite wounds in the right arm and left leg, tourniquets have been applied. All units be advised that tear gas makes the swarming weasels even more aggressive. Alert for sectors Juliet through Lima: about fifty swarming weasels headed your way from sector Tango. Squashing them with tanks works. Additional units to…_

The warble tone that alerted for new portal activity sounded so loudly Loki fell to his knees and clutched his head, still broadcasting helplessly. _New portal in Sector Oscar. New Portal in Sector Oscar. Sector Oscar, report! Sector Oscar to Pirate ship; looks like a pretty small force – maybe… two, no, three individuals. Scanning energy signals… Holy shit, is that THOR?_

Merciful fingers plucked the comm link from Loki's ear and the noise settled down to the dull roar of the battle.

“Loki?” Banner's wide face and the Leewit's narrow one both tilted into view, wearing identical worried expressions.

“Thor,” Loki whispered.

^^^^^^^^^^

“Delivering captured enemy device to Bay Chi Fifty-Nine,” the scouts informed Command, “possibly to include Terran Operative.”

A team of techs and one behemoth of a Raalgavian interrogator assembled at once, watching the approaching scouts and their tiny, dangerous cargo. The two flanking beams disengaged and the ships peeled away to their own docking brackets, while the third steered their captive through the lock.

“It was communicating with some kind of command unit until a centisecond or so ago,” the Scout pilot informed them, “and now it’s gone dormant.”

“Acknowledged,” the Raalgavian creaked. “Priorities for our inquiries?”

A Lieutenant from the Intelligence Division answered over the comm. “General data gathering only. We already know where the Stones are, and little else is of importance. It is deemed unlikely that they would have risked an operative with significant intelligence for this mission.”

“Acknowledged.” The metallic bipedal form floated into the bay, still caught in the web of the tractor beam. Cautious, the techs activated the matching capture field on their transport pallet, just in case the thing was rigged to blow as soon as it lost its signal or something.

It proved to be a wise precaution. The device did not explode, but as soon as the trundle moved it out of the loading bay and into the tech wing, it _collapsed._ The complex interlocking pieces of the armor ceased to interlock, and it fell apart into a mess of tiny parts and a gush of conductive gel. It would probably take them megaseconds to even figure out which bits were supposed to fit together after this! 

“Lucky it’s not a priority project,” the senior tech groused, while the junior tech stared, dismayed, at the mass of gel matrix now dripping off the trundle. The stuff was a different color than galactic standard: a faint tan rather than bright blue, and it smelled strongly of aluminum and iodine. 

“No evidence of anything but gel matrix inside,” Junior tech said, “so it must have been remotely piloted. Also, uck.” It hastily tapped the code to deactivate the capture field, before the goo level at the bottom of the force sphere could rise high enough to compromise the trundle's mechanics. The viscous puddle splashed to the floor

“Oh, stop whining and just spray that stuff into the disposal drain,” Senior Tech barked, “There’s enough clinging to the mechanical parts that we can get a sample later if we want it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The tech corridors had spray nozzles set at regular intervals. It took almost no time at all to chase the repellent alien sludge down a drain and get on with the day’s work.

And because the drains went everywhere in the tech wing, it took the dozen yeeherak who’d been piloting the suit only a few minutes after that to get into an empty lab with a hookup to the shipwide systems. Titanese conductive gel matrix was not the tastiest thing they’d ever had to eat in a hurry, but they’d do far worse to help save the universe. And once Blob Squad One had control of a couple key signals, they could open a door for the much larger Blob Squad Two, currently en route in one of Pirate Ship’s lifeboats, and things would get _really_ interesting.

^^^^^^^^

“Annnd… they’re in,” Agent Johnson announced. Rhodey sighed in relief. Now he just needed to hope Veronica could send him a backup suit before they needed him to blow anything up for the Pirate ship.

^^^^^^^^^

How perverse was it, Loki wondered, that he heard his brother's bellowing war-cry and saw the clouds of debris in the air swirl above him, and felt _cheated?_

It wasn't that he was sorry his brother lived. Loki had thought himself likely to die avenging him, or, just possibly, live mourning all that they had never been, replaying centuries-old, fruitless arguments in his head, regretting his own cold, brittle nature that had never been able to take the love his brother offered because the carelessness that came with it hurt him so. It would be painful and it would be over, and Loki would be free. The thing was, knowing the oaf had not perished changed this vision of the future very little, save now, in addition to mourning, he would have to do something about whatever the idiot managed to get up to in the meantime.

This was undisciplined. Even had he still hated Thor as badly as he had after the attack on Jotunheim, he still would have been glad to see him today, fighting on the same side, if not _at_ his side. Thor with his – that wasn’t mjolnir, but it stank of dwarven _seidr_ even from here – his new weapon, was, surely, an asset against the Mad Titan and the three Stones he wielded. Loki could be glad of that and leave the rest for later, assuming there was a later. Their cover was gone and the Chitauri were down. It was time to regroup with the sorcerer and the golem.

^^^^^^^^^

Vision's internal monitoring system sent him a continuous error message, which he continuously overrode.

_Error: TeamMission sub-goal Draw Thanos to Frontline ≠ PersonalImperative Protect Life_

_Override: TeamImperative Stop Thanos=PersonalImperative Protect Life >Protect Earth>Protect Team._

_Error: Wanda is at risk_

_Override._

_Override, error, override…_ over and over every few hundredths of a second, a constant, small, but measurable drain on Vision's processing capacity, at a time when he had a use for every last byte. He wondered if the state engendered by this weary round resembled the human concept of “self-pity.” The moment would come, more than soon enough, where he would need to emerge from the magical cocoon Wanda shielded him with and take a more active part in the fractal, error-prone world of physical action. He could do little in the meantime but track the data: all of it. Every comm channel, encrypted and otherwise, dedicated to a single squad or to the entire field. Everything he could cram through his uplink to Veronica, to Friday, to the Pirate Ship. He listened, and watched, and mapped. When it came time to move, he wanted to know exactly what was going on.

_New Portal in Sector Oscar…_

The portals had changed after the Chitauri fell; the great one they poured through closed, and smaller ones opened, for briefer times and at unpredictable places. The New York portal had needed a device to keep it open and stable. The Mojave portals might also require such a device, and Blob Squads One and Two might have interfered. Alternatively, the new portals might gain their energy from the Power Stone as much as the Space Stone, and the change in portal behavior could be keyed to the strategic needs of the new forces being sent through.

_Scanning energy signals… Holy Shit, is that THOR?_

Vision pulled his memory files related to the Prince of Asgard and moved them from the “inactive/ deceased” folder and into “active/ involved.” It triggered a subroutine flag:

_Movement from this folder has an 81% correlation with increased threat level. Ref. Stark, Anthony; Vanko, Ivan; Killian, Aldrich; Barnes, James._

In the distance, Thor bellowed and raised his new weapon (energy signature differing from mjolnir’s in both nature and magnitude) to the sky. A powerful energy discharge disabled four enemy hovercraft and a U.S. Army Bearcat in his immediate vicinity.

_Increased threat level confirmed._

( _Error. Override. Error. Override. _)__

__Vision spent a precious second reviewing troop movements and communications until he identified the Bearcat’s inhabitants and comm frequencies. Mr. Stark had not yet managed to build completely Thor-proof communicators, but he had managed to shield dormant chips with no current running through them; every vehicle carried spares ready to switch out in moments like these. Once it was at least 90% likely that the Bearcat was in touch again, Vision hailed it. “Tac Sigma Fifty-two, do you read?”_ _

__The reply crackled. “Tac Sigma Fifty-two, three by four.” Barely acceptable clarity, slightly reduced volume. Vision boosted his outgoing signal a hair._ _

__“Tac Sigma Fifty-two, can you deliver a Terran Defense comm unit to Thor?”_ _

__“Roger. Mov--” another burst of static interrupted the transmission, and another voice overrode the signal, much louder and clearer than Tac Sigma had managed. Something in the timbre suggested that the voice was working its way through rather a lot of teeth. And possibly hailed from the Bronx._ _

__“Do you pink squishy assholes really think we couldn’t just piggyback on your channels with our comms? When you’re runnin’ your topside traffic through a goddamn Eelnats? I have never been so insultated in my life. If I didn’t owe Thor for gettin’ me into Nidrvalir I would be outta here like _that!”__ _

__Vision yanked control of the channel back for a moment with a tug of his mind. “Tac Sigma fifty-two, disregard, they don’t need comms.”_ _

( _Error. Override. Error. Override._ ) All units chimed again. _New Portal in Sector Foxtrot. New Portal in Sector Foxtrot. Scanning… Attention all units. We have confirmed Infinity Stones. Big Bad is on the field._

The error messages stopped dead. _Confirmed: TeamImperative Stop Thanos = PersonalImperative Protect Life._ Vision still was not wholly confident in his ability to accurately categorize emotions, but this one could be nothing but relief. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you really think you'd seen the last of the Central Park Blob Monsters? Me too, actually, but here we are all the same...


	36. Freeze!

Thanos had never bothered much with pomp and circumstance and showmanship. He made no attempt at a grand entrance on this newest battlefield. He simply arrived, without ceremony, and got to work.

His three remaining children hurried to join in the battle, eager to prove themselves, perhaps to avenge for their martyred brother. (For there seemed very little doubt that Ebony Maw had met Death), perhaps to prove themselves once and for all against their absent and traitorous sisters. With their departure, Thanos’ immediate surroundings formed a little bubble of calm in the middle of the turmoil. Few of his enemies would dare approach him, and none of his functionaries needed to.

One of his field marshals contacted him by comm with a status update: they'd set up a pyramidal reporting structure as soon as the Terrans had started buggering up ship-to-ground relays. This was sound procedure, but Thanos ignored most of the progress report; the ground troops on both sides of this conflict were little more than distractions. They could keep each other entertained without Thanos' intervention. All he cared about was the Stones, and for that he needed only to wait until their bearers approached him. They would do so. If they wanted a hope of surviving against Thanos’ superior forces and technology, they would need the most powerful tools they had, the most valuable ransom. They would come, meaning to fight, or to bargain, and it would end as Thanos meant it to. It was inevitable.

And indeed, a funny, motley little assemblage glared at him even now from a few score yards away. Thanos recognized the Hulk, whom he had so enjoyed defeating aboard the Asgardian ship, standing at the back of them. Just in front of the Hulk was a twitchy-looking Jotun warrior – one of Laufey’s kin from the look of it, and wasn’t that an interesting turn of events – with two adolescent Terran females flanking him, and two caped figures floating just above. Further out, other fliers and fighters took note of the changed battlefield and some of them, too, turned toward him to try their strength. And fail, no doubt. He smiled benignly. “You have a very simple choice to make,” he told the Stone-keepers. “You can surrender the Infinity Stones to me. If you do, half your people will die. So will half of the army I have arrayed against them; I don’t play favorites. Or, if you choose not to surrender the Stones, then _all_ of your planet will die.” He met the Hulk’s eyes. “Even you,” he said, “much though I enjoyed our little sparring match earlier.”

The yellow-caped flier nearest the dark-haired female spoke first. “With the Mind Stone’s aid,” it said, “I can perceive enough of your thought patterns to know how unproductive it would be to attempt to persuade you of your mistakes.”

“So we shall simply have to demonstrate,” concluded the red-caped figure next to the other, gray-clad female. And then they attacked.

“I have to admit,” Thanos said as he deflected the first energy beam with a wave of the Gauntlet, “I hoped that would be your choice.”

^^^^^^^^^^

Wanda struck first. Her power burst from her in a crimson scream: unhinged fury made visible and very nearly tangible. It met a globe of orange light that sprang up around the Titan, and the point of collision was a curtain of white-hot fire that melted a line of glass into the desert ground.

“My parents were taken from me,” Wanda chanted, barely loud enough to be heard, “My home was taken. My _twin_ was taken. And _no one_ will take my Vision!”

Her Vision shot a second beam of energy at Thanos’ forcefield, a brighter, more tightly focused one. It pierced Wanda's globular hexes like a thread through a chain of beads, turning her scattered attacks into something more coordinated.

Thanos did not appear to notice the addition. “You people,” he growled, “are so. Very. _Inconvenient!”_ He grunted with effort, and the orange light of his forcefield turned purple and burst outward, sending everyone stumbling or shooting backward. Wanda was drawing up her power again as soon as she caught her footing, but Thanos had opened another portal and some alien ship the size of a 767 came roaring through. Dr. Strange opened a portal of his own in its path. The slice of air between them suddenly resembled a passing subway as seen through the windows of another train.

“Yes, well,” Dr. Strange said dryly over the roar of the transient vessel, “that’s life for you.”

^^^^^^^^^

Loki hung back, watching intently, cataloging every separate element of the mad welter of violence that bloomed around Thanos. The Reality Staff hummed in his hands. The correct instant for action would come. There would be a moment where a well-placed illusion would move the Titan to a mistaken action, or where a temporary change to the laws of physics would be useful, rather than merely confounding. If worst came to worst, Loki was prepared to use the Staff to cancel the weak nuclear force in the ground under Thanos’ feet, letting the atoms collapse on themselves and form a new black hole to contain Titan, Stones, and all. It would be bad news for the earth and probably the rest of the galaxy, but better that than the destruction of the entire universe. But it wasn’t time for anything that desperate yet; there were any number of other moves, and the moment would come. Loki watched.

^^^^^^^^

Bruce hung back, keeping half an eye on the brawl around the Titan but the rest of his attention on the rest of the field. He already knew Thanos could kick his ass, and that being the case, it made more sense to watch his partners’ backs and keep them from being swarmed. The Leewit crouched nearby, sheltering in Bruce’s bulk and (he hoped) making her whistles available for the long-range work that Bruce was unsuited for. She, however, wasn’t paying attention to the field. She was, or seemed to be, wholly absorbed in a fierce conversation with some completely unseen entity.

“I’m not clumping stupid!” she snapped. “Of _course_ the whole ‘bringing balance’ thing is a load of rugglepop; no way the guy can be that bad at algebra.”

“Algebra?” Bruce repeated. He really ought to stop imagining there was such a thing as a normal battlefield conversation. Why not algebra?

“ ‘Cause that’s how the distributive property _works!_ If you have too many schooner fish for the phytoplankton population to support, than half the schooner fish are gonna be too many for half the plankton. Balance, schmalance. The whole ‘in love with Death’ rumor made more sense, and that’s saying something!”

Bruce blinked, momentarily distracted. “Once you take differing reproductive cycle speeds into account it changes things a bit, but yes, you have a point, and that would be one reason nobody calls Thanos the _sane_ Titan.”

“Wasn’t talking to you,” the Leewit grumbled. “I _know!”_ she shouted at whatever she was actually talking to. “I’m _thinking._ It’s _tricky_. And you’d better be ready to hold up your end of the bargain, ‘cause if he makes more trouble after that, I will Egger a beacon right into your klatha core and you’ll have to deal with Pausert _and_ Goth _and_ Toll, you hear me?”

Bruce had no idea what any of that meant, and he hoped he never would.

^^^^^^^^

Dr. Strange had seen this battle from so many angles, in so many iterations – in New York, in Wakanda, on other planets. He could drown in the memories, or he could let them buoy him, settle into his muscles like the hundreds on hundreds of sculls he had opened over the years in hundreds on hundreds of surgeries. With a tilt of his shoulders, he had the Cloak carry him out of the path of the next combined attack on the Titan from Vision and the Scarlet Witch. He could not say whether he felt more awe or envy for their seamless teamwork. Of the earthly Stone-bearers, they seemed the most comfortable handling the Mind Stone as a source of raw energy. What their assaults had to do with the Mind, Stephen didn’t know, but they were blazingly effective. And Wanda, who had been shaped by the Stone but did not hold it, seemed still to be able to use it as well as her partner did. To have two users rather than one seemed like it should be a diminishment, but half of Infinity is still Infinity. Vision’s order and the Witch’s chaos might have been the left and right halves of some fathomless brain.

Compared to those searing laser blasts, his own use of the Time Stone was a strobe-light flicker: a diffuse but nearly constant pulse of a million tiny adjustments, so that every portal, every binding, every banishment, landed in the exact right instant and place, missing disaster by millimeters. It was, in its way, like performing surgery on a whole city at once. He should have asked Stark for access to the music system; he could do with a little Karen O right now.

^^^^^^^

Thanos was hundreds of times as old as the planet he now stood on, had been building his forces and balancing the universe and progressing in his quest for the Stones for eons on eons while these chattering apes pulled themselves upright and set about ruining their home. (Or, he thought that was about right. Time got fuzzy when one had so much of it, and so many more important things to track.) He had all the time in the universe, and the Terrans might well destroy themselves unaided in a mere century or so. It would have been reasonable to lay siege and wait them out. But they had three Stones now, only barely outside his reach, these ephemeral, ignorant fools who would. Not. Listen. He could be forgiven a little impatience.

He opened portals in front of four more Raalgavian tiremes, each one twice the size of the Chitauri leviathans. All four streaked onto the field and away again through other portals opened by the red-caped braggart who held the Time Stone. “I will banish every ship you bring here,” the creature promised.

Thanos took a breath and recovered his poise. “Why would I bother with mere ships,” he asked mildly, “when your moon is all but unguarded? With the Space Stone I can reach it, and with Power, I might send it crashing into its sister planet once more, or wheeling out into the far reaches of the galaxy, or crush it to atoms and dust. So far as you are concerned, the effect would be much the same regardless. I can do that now. Or you can give me the Stones.”

The Terrans panicked like the children they were, with the two caped fliers retreating into a huddle with the Hulk and the Jotun and the women just as if they could not talk perfectly well through their communicators. One of Thanos’ savvier lieutenants used the time to obtain and relay the current coordinates and best angle of attack for the targeted moon. Thanos smiled again, planted his feet, braced his left arm with his right, and raised the Gauntlet into position, “Ten,” he counted, “Nine, eight...” 

^^^^^^^

“We can’t let him touch the moon,” Bruce said urgently. “We _can’t.”_

Loki nodded grimly, reciting to himself the shape of the spell that would, he hoped, crush Thanos from the inside. If the others looked like giving in, he would create that black hole after all.

“We cannot stop him!” the Scarlet Witch wailed. “The portals are like maelstroms! Any power we try to send against them gets sucked in!”

“We need time!” Loki snapped. “Strange! Freeze him!”

The sorcerer’s eyes widened. He jerked, whipped around, and sent a blast of green light to surround the Titan just as he said, “One.”

Thanos stilled. It might have been deliberate, even, save for the dust that hung motionless in the air around him, the half-formed portal spinning out from the Gauntlet like an electric blue neon lasso.

“Wow,” Bruce said. 

“Can’t keep this up long,” Strange warned.

“Yes!” the Leewit crowed. “Can’t make a pitcher out of water, but you can make one out of ice.”

“Ice,” Loki repeated blankly, and then straightened, electrified. _“Ice!”_ He whirled the Reality Staff above his head, brought it down to point at the timeless Titan. A blast of red light joined the green, washing out the color within their shared compass. A clear, slick, crystalline shell seemed to form on their enemy’s grayed skin, and on the bright lines of the suspended portal. “Leewit!” Loki grunted.

“Clumping _awesome!”_ the Leewit cheered. “Cover your ears!”

Hands are wonderful, useful devices, arrived at from a thousand directions by a thousand evolutionary lines because of their utility, but they are inadequate protection against the kind of uncanny whistle that can shatter a piece of crystallized magic. Loki and Strange both nearly collapsed, losing hold of their spells in identical huffs of air. Wanda swayed dizzily and sat down hard. Bruce clutched at himself, trying to contain a formless, searing pain that seemed to exist in his memory without having first existed in the present. Vision phased out entirely, phased back in upside down, and had to re-orient himself.

And the portal exploded like a bottle rocket, into scores and hundreds of sharp blue sparks that sped outward, capturing stray pebbles, bullet casings, sprigs of goats-head thorn, and seven-twelfths of a grasshopper and scattering them across the galaxy.

Dr. Strange leaned back into the Cloak, panting.

Thanos slowly lowered the Guantlet and met the sorcerer’s eyes. “Interesting,” he said. The Titan’s eyes had gone a little vague.

The Leewit scrubbed at her mouth with the back of a hand. “One down,” she breathed.

Only Hulk and Vision heard her over the general cacophony. “What?” said Bruce.

The Leewit squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “One down, five to go,” she said. “We broke the whole connection, not just the portal. Thanos won’t be able to use the Space Stone again.”

Loki choked. Bruce sputtered. Strange closed his mouth. As one, they craned their necks to peer at Thanos, who looked down at the Guantlet contemplatively, his face its usual calm mask. He might be confused, or angry, or any number of other things, but in this moment, at least, he was not attacking. He looked a little hazy through the clouds of blowing smoke and dust, as though cutting him off from the Space Stone had changed his relationship with Space itself, and he no longer occupied it with such conviction as before.

“You are serious,” said Wanda.

“Uh-huh,” the Leewit promised. “Swear to Patham. Wanna try the Time Stone next?”

^^^^^^^^^^

Of course they did. It was not a simple matter, though, and both Loki and Dr. Strange were momentarily spent. Wanda, being more accustomed to, if not more comfortable with, the uses of cannon fodder than the others on her team, was the one to activate her comm. “We need ten minutes! Someone keep the Titan busy!”

In answer, a convoy of Humvees that had been spiraling in from Sector Charlie banked into a more direct route and sped up, making for the Titan. Loki spotted them and obligingly activated the Reality Stone, transforming the knot of invaders between the soldiers and their goal into a mass of duckweed and gravel. It was, he thought, a less slippery mix to work through than plain mud, at least.

Above them, Iron Man made a strafing run, diving in from the Titan’s blind spot. One of the repulsors clipped the back of Thanos’ bald head, splitting the skin an inch or two at the center of the burn. As he looped skyward again, he jeered over his amplifier: “Watch your god bleed, you assholes!”

Cyclops stalked forward from Sector Gamma, keeping his optic beam focused on Thanos’ corrugated chin, incinerating anything that came between him and it as he drew closer and the beam grew narrower and hotter. The Titan, aiming a beam of his own at the fleeing Iron Man, did not seem to notice at first, until the beam was raised to focus on his eyes. Cyclops had little attention for his surroundings at times like this, having to trust his teammates to watch his back for him. He nearly stumbled when the ground in front of him erupted suddenly with the sounds of gunfire and animal screeches.

In his peripheral vision, he spotted a dim, child-sized shape, crouched around some kind of gun or blaster. The blaster sent out a steady rattle of bright orange bolts in the Titan’s direction, and its wielder scooted backward in increments with every bolt. Cyclops sidestepped a little to place himself in the way and felt the weight as the little figure braced itself against him. Together, they kept the Titan under assault from throat to kneecaps for nearly thirty seconds before they had to throw themselves to either side to avoid a purple blast from the Gauntlet. 

Once he’d stopped rolling, Cyclops lifted himself on his elbows and met the mad gaze of a giant, grinning raccoon. “Nice job there!” it congratulated, without making any effort to help him up. “How much for the energy visor?”

“It’s not the visor,” Cyclops explained, getting up, “It’s my eyes.”

“Huh! How much for the eyes, then?”

“Gonna pretend you’re joking.”

“Yeah, yeah, you do that, humie.”

The lead Humvee finally rolled to a stop some hundred meters from the Titan, the others peeling to either side as they started to lock in a perimeter. The gun turret raised an inch. Thanos glanced at the vehicle and raised the Guantlet again. The lead Humvee’s windows glowed purple, and purple sparks danced across its surface. A moment later, the whole thing collapsed into dust. Two more vehicles destroyed before they could attack, and the rest of the convoy was backing up into a full retreat. 

^^^^^^^^

Strange worried. The Leewit assured them that they could block Thanos from using the Time Stone without letting it into his possession; “He’s in Time just like the rest of us, isn’t he? There’s a connection there already,” but it seemed to Strange a tenuous thing to try and do off the cuff.

“Last time we used the Time Stone to make the connection brittle enough that we could damage it,” he pointed out. “Can we still do that when it’s the Time Stone we’re messing with?” 

“I believe it may be done,” Vision said, “though I would like Loki to confirm my understanding. It seems to me that the Reality Stone, not the Time Stone, was the one to change the nature of the connection. The Time Stone merely prevented Thanos from interrupting us.”

“And how do we make sure I don’t get cut off when Thanos does? Or instead?” Strange countered.

“Perhaps not a break, as such,” Loki suggested. “Perhaps something more like an uprooting. Use Reality to temporarily alter the rules of magic to make the threads more… coherent, and then… pull.”

“If I whistle at Thanos instead of the Stone,” the Leewit offered, “I might be able to … loosen up the ground a little. But not if he’s frozen in time – can’t do resonance on something that doesn’t move. Last time the spell just caught the root of the portal and not the half in Space, stretched it to snapping, but this time...”

“So we need to do _something_ with the Titan but not freeze him. Age him, maybe?”

“No, we need merely _prepare_ to do something with the Titan. Identify him as the target and draw our bow without releasing the bolt. And then the Reality Stone, and then the whistle while Strange pulls back.”

As Vision sent a helpful bolt of energy skyward in response to something only he heard, he cautioned, “The operation will need to be very carefully timed.”

“I’m quite good at that,” Strange smirked, “What do you think, Vision? Will it work?”

But Vision didn’t have a chance to answer. While considering the question of Strange’s timing, they had all forgotten something else.

_Thor’s_ timing was _horrible._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I choose to believe the exchange between Big Bossy, the Leewit, and Bruce concerning the distributive property also took place at a script conference somewhere along the line, because that is less depressing than assuming that all of Marvel Studios failed seventh-grade math.


	37. Power and Time

He came roaring through the sky, other fliers diving hastily out of the way, or perhaps they were forced, buffeted by the turbulence of his wake. He climbed upward like a hunting gryphon, his battleaxe glowing with power and heat. At the peak of his climb, the axe went hurtling down, a thunderbolt (what else?) in metal and magic, its wielder diving behind it.

Strange ducked through a portal. Hulk winced away; the Leewit threw herself flat on the ground. Loki skipped backward a pace or two, frustrated at the interruption. “Not now, Thor!” he grated, but his brother could not hear him, likely didn't even see him, between his speed and battle-fever and Loki's own disguise. A few words came back on the wind of his passage. “ _Now_ you shall know the wrath of Asgard!”

It very nearly worked.

Had Thanos reacted a hair slower, waited an instant longer to sidestep or bring up the Gauntlet, the axe might have decapitated him, or lodged itself in his chest. Instead the familiar purple glow burst out from the Titan's mailed forearm and the axe plummeted past him, plowing itself into the cracked ground. The Titan pivoted, bringing his fist up to meet Thor. Bruce thought he heard ribs crack. A baseline human meeting that immense left cross at that speed would have burst like a watermelon. Thor sailed backward with a grunt and crashed into the remains of one of the disintegrated Humvees.

 ~~Bru~~ _Hulk_ rushed the Titan himself and got thrown to the ground and kicked for his trouble. By the time he rolled out of range and got to his feet, Thanos had pulled the battleaxe from its furrow and was hefting it in his right hand. It seemed that this weapon had no worthiness-meter built into it. Bruce started to circle, trying to get behind the Titan and out of throwing range without calling any attention to the cluster of magicians who were still trying to … do their thing.

Thor, too, had gotten to his feet, and he thrust a hand into the air. “Stormbreaker!” he bellowed, and the axe in Thanos' hand gave a lurch. Thanos tightened his hold and was nearly yanked over sideways. He yanked back and gripped the handle with both hands, but Stormbreaker would not be gainsaid. It strained inexorably back toward its wielder's summoning hand, dragging the Titan behind it like a waterskier and stirring up clouds of dust.

The visual seemed to amuse Tony, since the next Iron Man strafing run was accompanied, not by classic rock, but by the _beebeep-WHOOOSH_ of the old Roadrunner cartoons.

When Thanos still hadn’t released Stormbreaker’s handle by the time it reached Thor, the Asgardian used it for leverage, swinging up to yell in Thanos’ face while striking his chest over and over with feet and knees. Thanos seemed scarcely to feel the blows.

Hulk pounded over the ground toward them, hoping to spring on the Titan from behind; throttle him, perhaps – anything to get his attention and make him loosen his grip. Before he could reach the combatants, though, Thanos had clasped one hand over both of Thor’s and flung him to the ground, following up with a boot to the chest. Thor wheezed. Thanos plucked Stormbreaker from his spasming hand and threaded the handle through his belt. He glanced over his shoulder and sent Hulk wheeling back with another casual blast of the Power Stone. He looked down at his captive.

“I remember you, little prince,” the Titan purred. He smiled his terrible, patient smile, and pitched his voice to carry. “Your brother thought your life was worth the price of the Tesseract, Thor, and you wasted the gift immediately, seeking a useless revenge.” He leaned a little more of his weight onto the foot that sat on Thor’s chest. “Your brother is dead,” he declared. “Shall we see if any of your friends care enough for you to pay the same price?” Slowly, almost tenderly, he opened his left hand and held it flat above the fallen Thor. 

Thor’s eyes filled with purple light, purple sparks danced across his skin, and he screamed.

^^^^^^^^

Thor’s dead brother didn’t realize he was running toward the Titan until he tripped over the Leewit and went sprawling. She’d said something, he thought, but he only caught the end of it: the words _you dope._ He’d just rolled to his stomach and gotten his elbows under him when the touch of a huge hand between his shoulder blades made him freeze.

“New plan,” the Hulk rumbled. “We break the Power Stone’s hold first, and _then_ the Time Stone.

Oh. Stones. Yes. Quite. Loki didn’t bother getting up from the ground, merely tilted the Reality Staff up under one shoulder and shot a beam at the Titan. _Ice,_ he thought, _turn it to ice._ A voice sounded in his memory, though he could not recall whose, or when. _Arbitrary power, like all hard things, is easily broken._ A beam of gold hit the Titan from above as Loki’s crimson ray struck him from below. Vision, not Strange, was joining the attack. Of course. Another ancient lesson: only the Mind could truly harness Power.

Thor did not stop screaming, and Thanos’ eyes did not stop shifting about, watching for reactions. But Loki could see the thin bolt of light joining the Gauntlet and his fallen brother, and its texture was changing. Not a crystalline sheathe this time, but a frosty rime: countless sharp, granular spicules emerging from the connection’s interior rather than coating from without. But ice, all the same. Ice. Hard things were easily broken.

Thor’s timing was horrible. Thor’s _friends’_ timing was also horrible. A great silver disc came sailing through the air, striking Thanos against the back of his head and then bouncing back into the hands of the importunate Captain. Thanos rubbed at the impact point with his right hand but didn’t bother turning around. The Captain pelted toward him, looking ready to jump on the Titan’s back and start bludgeoning him. The Leewit shrieked. “The stem! Tell that guy to aim for the stem!”

Banner, by some miracle of intuition, untangled this order correctly. He inflated his green chest and roared. “Cap! Throw the shield between the Gauntlet and Thor!”

In answer, Captain America changed his headlong rush into a rolling dive, sending the shield skimming low over the ground. In the moment that its leading edge met the frozen thread of power and rang with the impact, the Leewit whistled.

^^^^^^^^^

Did the Power Stone loose its hold more slowly than the Space Stone had? It seemed possible to follow every crack and fissure that spread up from that narrow stem, branching around the Gauntlet, and branching further and further out in a globe around the Titan, until Thanos was the center of a starburst of flying purple sparks. 

Thor stopped screaming. Loki tucked his head back down, tried to guard the back of his neck with his hands. Above and behind him, the Hulk’s voice mumbled nonsensically – something something Rupert drops. The Captain’s shield still rang, the sound growing louder instead of fading as it ricocheted off the strand of magic, and then the ground, and then the bottom of a skimmer, as if the shield had somehow trapped the Leewit’s whistle within itself and was amplifying it. The Captain, grimacing, had both hands clapped over his ears and was watching his weapon as though it were bouncing in the wrong direction and he had half a mind to chase after it.

The Leewit watched too. “Great Patham,” she gasped, “what is that thing made of?”

“Vibranium,” Vision replied crisply, taking to the skies again.

“Really? Oh, _beek-wok_ , you people are clumping _insane!”_ She sounded admiring, but there was no time to pursue the question further. Thanos, enraged, had finally tired of ignoring the Stone Bearers. 

He strode away from the place where Thor slumped on the ground, making straight for Loki and the Leewit. “YOU!” he thundered, “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!”

Loki scrambled to his feet; the Leewit sprang to hers. “It's for your own good!” she chirped, eyes darting about, searching for Strange and Hulk and Vision. She whistled, short and sharp. “Guys! Time Stone! Now!”

It was too soon, Loki wanted to say. He still felt the burn of the Reality Stone's path along his nerves from the last volley. The chill strength the ice worker had gifted him with earlier had all melted away… but the Leewit was right. They had to do it, and they had to do it now. Loki tilted the staff up and took a breath.

^^^^^^^^

Bruce rushed the Titan and got thrown to the ground again. He was outmatched and knew it, but Cap was attacking, too, and Iron Man from above, and Thanos had only one stone, now, not three. And he didn't have to beat the guy; just buy a little more time...

His roll took him near to where Thor stirred, groaning. “ Di – diddai get'm?” He blinked his eyes – eyes, plural, Bruce noted with some surprise, the right-hand one gleaming blue from its pupil – probably unfathomable alien tech. “Ah,” Thor said. “Friend Hulk.” He struggled upright. “This is splendid. I will summon Stormbreaker again, and you and I will attack the Titan together.” He coughed.

Bruce clamped a hand firmly on Thor's shoulder. “Nope,” he said. “You're gonna see if the Leewit can heal those ribs. C'mon.” He clasped an arm around the (puny) blonde and tossed him over toward the knot of magicians. “Leewit! Fix his ribs!” By the time Leewit, exasperated, called back, "In a MINUTE!" Bruce was rushing the Titan again.

Thor looked blearily at the curious assemblage Hulk had delivered him to: the Witch of Sokovia, a gray-clad girl-child, an undersized Jotun warrior. “We don't got time for your ribs now, mister,” the strange girl told him sharply, “We've got klatha stuff to do.”

“It is of no matter,” Thor assured her, “I am well able to keep fighting.” He turned to face the Titan once more, in time to see him catch the Captain’s shield and send it flying away into the air, while the Captain himself staggered backward. The Titan pivoted to close once more with the Hulk, and Thor planted his feet and filled his lungs as best he was able. He raised a hand. “Storm-”

Chill fingers clamped over his mouth. “Not _now,_ brother!” hissed an impossibly familiar voice. Thor made a protesting noise in his throat and flexed his knees.

“You are hurt, and we are busy,” the voice informed him. The hands moved away from his mouth, but something – someone – seized the back of his belt and wormed a few fingers under the neck of his cuirass. Thor found himself pulled off his feet and being swung through the air in circles, as if he were a boy of fifty again. “It is _your_ turn to get help, Thor!” The cold fingers let go and Thor was airborne, flying in entirely the wrong direction.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Even knowing his brother would not interrupt him, Loki could have done nothing had it not been for the Leewit. Had he not seen and felt the ways her whistles worked, watched from the inside as she healed his jaw, danced with her through the patterns of the Sheewash drive, he could not have done it. He didn't think even another Karres witch could have taught him what he needed to know, since their gifts were so individual, but the Leewit knew resonance, knew waveforms. And Loki had started to learn.

He had no strength left to move the _seidr_ of the Reality Stone into channels and pumps and vessels of will, as he had the last two times, but he could do as she did, match pulses to its internal rhythms, turning drops to ripples to waves, amplifying and echoing, so that the Stone shaped itself to his tune. Not the openness of a vessel but of a sounding box, the influence not on its contents but on the surrounding air. Carefully, rhythmically, he pushed at the Reality Stone, listening to the oceanic notes of rushing water, or blood, the steady boom of waves and heartbeats. Now. And now. And now. With each tap, the note changed – more and more in tune.

The world outside the Stone faded. Dimly, he thought he saw the Man of Iron and one or two other filers diving at the Titan in physical attacks. Well enough, but he had no attention for it. And now. And now. Even the gentle, steady taps of power hurt. But now he could hear the Time Stone, too, vibrating through the sea of possibility like the strings of a boundless harp. The two stones were in harmony now, each supporting the other. And here came the Leewit's whistle again- balancing the careful edge between consonance and dissonance – the haunting interval the Midgardians called a "blue note." Doubtless for those who couldn't hear the rest of the chord, it was as miserable to bear as most of her assault whistles. Loki smiled. And _NOW._

The Time Stone snapped away from Thanos in a high, faint _ping._ Loki breathed out, swimming back upward from the depths of the Reality Stone even as the Staff enticed its Stone’s power back within its ever-changing confines. Loki had fallen to his knees at some point, he noted absently.

Strange landed next to him, looking battered. “That was… certainly something,” he said.

“Yes,” Loki breathed. But the Titan would not stop attacking, surely – and even with the Stones locked away from him (for now, at least – how easy would it be to reverse?) he still had his age, his might, his army, and the battleaxe he had wrested from Thor. Loki could not afford to contemplate epiphanies yet. He closed his eyes, opened them, and turned his head to face Thanos.

The Titan, too, looked caught up in strange epiphanies. The faint haze that had clung to him when they disengaged the Space Stone had turned to an aura of black flame; his outlines seemed to flare and snap and bleed into the air, only to return again. His feet did not quite seem to interact with the ground they stood on, as if he had been cut from some other picture entirely and pasted into this battlefield by a careless hand. He stood still, head up, but eyes unfocused, mouth hanging open in an expression of wonder. “Oh,” he said. 

^^^^^

Thor landed in a knot of confused looking people in yellow uniforms, his own brain still quite fuzzy, full of disbelief. That voice, that blue-skinned figure… “Loki?” he asked the air. “Loki?” The word was a mumble; his mouth wasn't working quite right.

“No,” said the thin, dark blue man who reached a hand out to help him up. “My name is Kurt. Logan is in Sector Tango, with the raccoon and the tree boy. Here. I will take you there.” And in the next instant, Thor was three and a half sectors away, in the middle of another fight entirely.

^^^^^

“Toooold-ya!” the Leewit caroled, watching the stunned Titan with a smug grin. Thanos gave no sign of hearing her, or anyone; he gazed into the middle distance, raising his right hand up to eye level and turning it back and forth, watching, it seemed, the black flames that danced around his fingers. “Just wait’ll we get the Mind Stone done,” she crowed, “then you’ll feel _real_ silly.”

Bruce didn’t think “silly” was how he would describe his, or anyone else’s feelings right at the moment. Tony’s voice echoed through the comms. _What the fuck IS that? Is he knocked down or powering up?_ Bruce tapped a very startled Cap on the shoulder before he could wind up for another throw of the shield. “Non-magicians on the perimeter,” he said. He’d meant it as a suggestion, but Steve braced like it had been an order and nodded sharply, which was disorienting. Maybe Steve just meant he approved of the suggestion, Bruce thought as he leaped up into a swarm of gull-sized things with paralytic stingers, crushing a few in his fists and making the rest scatter. Or maybe Steve had been thrown by hearing polysyllables out of the Hulk.

Thanos clossed his mouth. “I can see… so much more, now,” he said. He drew his finger in a line through the air. The Scarlet Witch’s newest hex fell apart into two halves and then vanished. Wanda shrieked in outrage and fear. “I had no idea how limited I was before.”

Cap bounced his shield through the knot of stilt-legged creatures Scarlet Witch been aiming at, sending them tumbling into each other.

“Guess he can see klatha now,” the Leewit observed dispassionately.

“How is this helping?” Wanda demanded. “What are you trying to do?”

“Same thing as the rest of you!” the Leewit protested hotly, “Get Thanos out of the way!”

Iron Man lowered himself down into the cluster of arguing heroes. “Yeah, kid, OK,” he said, “But just what do you mean, exactly? Because it sounds like you have something else in mind here besides just keeping weapons out of the hands of the enemy.”

The Leewit stomped her foot. “Great Patham and his thousand flying fanderbags! I _just_ finished going over this with Big Bossy like, three minutes ago! I know not everyone here can talk to vatches, but _you_ guys–” she waved an impatient hand in a sweep that took in Loki, Strange, Vision, and Wanda, “shouldn’t have had any trouble.”

“We were a little busy just then,” Strange said dryly, but the Leewit was unappeased.

“OK, but even if you weren’t listening to Big Bossy and me you oughta been able to rell this – maybe Old Yarthe klatha is more different than I thought it was.”

Loki bit down on the last of his patience to keep it from running out, and spoke through clenched teeth. “Child, what, exactly, are you talking of? What should we have relled?”

“That Big Bossy isn’t the only vatch in the field,” the Leewit explained, as matter-of-fact as if her words made sense. “Thanos is a vatch, too, and he _hates_ it here. He’d be outta this dimension like _that_ , except the Stones are keeping him trapped somehow.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it's been a while since you read the Prologue... yeah, you might want to do that. Or not, that's fine too.
> 
> Happy Christmas, those of you who celebrate, and I'll see you all next year for the grand finale.


	38. Mind

Human operating parameters for rapid data triage depended heavily on the error-prone matrices of emotion. As a system, it had some advantages. Vision, who used a very different system, often appreciated being able to call on those advantages from his allies. But when, as now, new information upset the initial emotion-sort for previous information, moments like this one happened. Recalibrating an emotion-sort required large amounts of both mental energy and, often, bandwidth on interpersonal communication channels. Trying to, as humans put it, “process emotions” while also reviewing the new data tended to work about as well as trying to install system updates on a PC while also playing one of the battle modules in No Man's Sky. Everything got very slow and glitchy.

“He split my hexes like _paprenjak!”_ Wanda shouted, her eyes sparking dangerously.

Mr. Stark also seemed to be having difficulties. “I swear it's some kind of curse,” he said. “As soon as I start liking someone too much they switch sides. I should've seen it coming with Tinkerbell as soon as she decided she liked Loki better than me, but now she's siding with Grimace?”

Loki and Strange, meanwhile, both wanted to know if a vatch freed of the Stones' limitations was really a less dangerous vatch, which was, at least, a cogent question, but did not help the central problem: the Leewit had made a series of novel assertions and _nobody was checking the data._

Well, there were protocols and adages for situations like this: _If want TaskComplete = true, then ResourceAssigned:TaskComplete = self._ With only a little reluctance, Vision spent a second re-triageing his bandwidth use and relinquishing his attention on all but five of the communications channels; he was no more informed about the rest of the field now than his human teammates. _[Error – this action will reduce accuracy of ongoing fatality count. Override. Task EndFatalities > Task CountFatalities. Task EndFatalities requires additional data processing at this time._ He sent a quick message out to the channels he had ceased to monitor, to let them know he was disengaging for the next hundred and twenty seconds. _Begin Task._

The first premise that needed testing was “Big Bossy isn’t the only vatch in the field.” Vision could not corroborate this statement wholly. He could, however, review his sensors for supporting or contradictory evidence. He reviewed the anomalies he had detected on the Leewit’s second day at Avengers Compound, that she had said were vatch-caused, along with similar scans from a few other instances in which the Leewit had started talking to thin air – notably shortly before the Bergdorf’s Incident. The scans showed certain similarities with each other that were not present with control scans of other people talking to thin air (with the exception of those taken around Mr. Wade Wilson, but Mr. Wilson had also been aware of Vision’s presence before Vision phased into view, and the whole experiment had clearly been an outlier.) Given this history, Vision was 75.3% confident that he was capable of, as the Leewit put it, “relling vatch.” He was 53.6% confident that he could measure greater and lesser degrees of vatchiness in a given time and place. In this present moment, assuming he had his markers correctly identified, the ambient vatch energy was higher than in previous encounters with “Big Bossy.” Not enough to be a compelling argument on its own, but suggestive, nonetheless. Premise 1 was not ruled out.

_[Elapsed Task Time:6.754 seconds. Error: Loki appears to be threatening Mr. Stark. Override: Loki’s ambient energy readings remain unchanged.]_

Premise 2: “Thanos is a vatch too,” was, like Premise 1, not ruled out but also not verifiable unless Big Bossy elected to communicate with other people in addition to the Leewit. And even then, Big Bossy was not necessarily a reliable source. The same could be said for Premises 3 and 4, which speculated as to the Titan’s emotional state and probable future actions. Since few of the Titan’s current actions supported these assertions, Premises 3 and 4 were, in Vision’s analysis, at least partially debunked.

_[Elapsed task time, 15.623 seconds.]_

“He’s trapped in a nightmare, and all he wants to do is wake up!” the Leewit insisted.

Premise 5: “The Stones are keeping him trapped somehow.” That one seemed like it ought to be possible to verify.

_[Error: Wanda is dangerously upset. Pause task. Protocol PreventLagosTwo activated.]_

Vision placed his body directly in front of Wanda's, closely enough to be able to embrace her when she let herself slump against his chest. He accessed her comm link directly, suppressed all feeds except his own, calculated his vocal timbre to reinforce the support/presence/affection matrix to the maximum degree. “Wanda, my dear?” 

Wanda shuddered and clasped her arms more tightly around him. “I remember,” she whispered. “I remember when the Stone came into my mind the first time, started to twist what it found there, making some things stronger, taking other things away… Vision, it laughed. It knew what it was doing! Even now, it remembers when I belonged to it… if that has happened to Thanos, too, the Stone will _know!”_

Vision ran a hand slowly over the back of her head and through her hair. “I am sorry, Wanda, that you have such a painful memory to live with. But also, thank you for reminding me. If the Stone created the Titan's madness, it will indeed remember.”

There was no reason to suppose that the Titan's madness would be as straightforward to uncreate as Wanda's had been, but that barely mattered. This was how he could verify or debunk Premise 5. Unfortunately, it would require even more bandwidth. He sent out a second comm message: “Vision to Pirate Ship, Veronica, Avengers, X-men, and Command A1: I will be completely offline for the next sixty seconds, attending a priority project.”

^^^^^^^^^

The uplink to the Mind Stone was hedged with firewalls upon firewalls upon quarantines upon virus scans. Vision could command the Mind Stone, but that relationship went one way only. To listen to the Stone… Thanos might be the lesser risk to Vision personally. _StopThanos=ProtectLife >ProtectSelf._ He needed the data.

Fortunately, the Stone seemed to be in a cooperative mood. (Vision did not experience, but could recognize, a wide variety of moods. Wanda had a lot of them. As did Mr. Stark.) Perhaps the recent opportunity to act against the Power Stone had pleased it, somehow. At any rate, when Vision sent the cautious query, _Thanos=Trapped!Vatch?_ through the link, the Stone responded with an eager flood of data that, if slowed to human speeds, might have qualified as the sort of communication Mr. Stark classified as a “villain monologue:”

_Oh, but he was_ fascinating! _Such an opportunity for study! An intelligence from outside Spacetime! Even the process of translating it into a mind that could function within our dimension was so very educational! Of course, it required considerable distortion. For instance, it took him a couple of millennia to establish a fully functional memory. What need had any extratemporal being to retain information when they could simply perceive it? And the same kind of thing among most of the other basic mental functions: simple cognition, sense of self, theory of mind… and then Reality put him on Titan, since it was equidistant from all of us, and that was a whole new set of influences!_

Vision allowed himself to recall the summarized version of his first, minutes-long ordeal adjusting to inhabiting – no – to existing as a physical body. To extrapolate into a situation more analogous to the Titan's, he then constructed an alternate scenario in which he underwent that same ordeal, but without an internet connection, and with his operating speeds reduced to near-human levels: only a few channels for conscience and deliberate cognition.

If that had been the case, there would have needed to be a ruthless purge of data to enable any function at all. 

Even the knowledge of what correct function entailed would have been reduced to such a bare outline as to be nearly nonsensical – certainly not enough information to rebuild his previous condition from scratch. And even that ghost of a concept might not have occupied the limited active cognition channels except intermittently. The press of events and the many needs of his new situation would have had higher priority. And if his support system, Mr. Stark and the others, had not known what he was and treated him as though he were no different than themselves?

Vision estimated that it would take sixty hours or less in that scenario for his own mind to be reduced all but permanently to the condition of a moderately intelligent human in an inexplicably durable body, with nothing but a vague intuition that something, somewhere, was wrong….

The Titan had had millennia. 

_[Elapsed time for Process StoneTalk: 15 seconds. Warning: Titan has made no attack in the last two minutes. Likelihood of an upcoming attack is increasing exponentially]_

Vision issued a sound that resembled a human throat clearing. “The Mind Stone confirms the Leewit's assertion about the Titan's origin,” he announced, and then relegated the monitoring of the Avengers' latest debate back to a sub-channel and returned his attention to the Stone.

_Fascination acknowledged,_ he told the Stone politely. It did not do to forget that the Mind Stone held dominion over irrational cognition as well as logic. _Posit: signal degradation + distortion > new information at this stage. Query: end experiment?_

The Mind Stone made an impression of pouting. _Distortions are also educational._

Vision was reminded of Mr. Stark and altered his communication style accordingly. _Yes,_ he responded, _but it seems to me that Thanos' current distortions are taking the very typical form of the grail-seeker type, with you Stones playing the role of fixation object. There are hundreds of those on nearly every planet with sentient life. Has he really done anything new recently?_ For emphasis, he returned to his more usual style. _Posit: Task KeepThanos=boring. If true, End task._

_[Elapsed time, Process StoneTalk:45 seconds. Warning: General Ross is ordering a drone strike on the Titan. Odds of drones damaging Titan, 0.19%. Odds of drones damaging allies, 81.2%]_

This, Vision reassured himself, was the correct course of action. Dr. Strange had said that keeping the Mind Stone out of Thanos' control was crucial to every future he had seen where Earth prevailed. Therefore, persuading the Mind Stone to relinquish its connection, thus taking away the Titan's means of access, was the correct action regardless of its other effects. But there was the faint, tantalizing hope that the Mad Titan's madness might be unmade…

_[Elapsed time, Process StoneTalk:58 seconds. Receiving additional communication from Mind Stone. Content: “Yeah, OK, fine.”]_


	39. Parley

Battlefields are noisy places. Thanos’ sudden, groaning cry was all but lost in the shriek of rockets, the rumble of engines, the thousands of other fighters, roaring, screaming, and groaning just as he was. Even Team Stonekeeper, the closest people to him physically, noticed the way he clutched his head before they registered the sound, saw the way the black flames that outlined his shape were joined by hairline streaks and popping speckles across the center of his image, as though the film he was printed on were deteriorating.

“Four Down,” Vision announced briskly to his immediate companions, who all glared at him and then looked around to reassess their surroundings. An instant or two later, he came up on the comms again, announcing the return of his attention. As an afterthought, he added, “Re-targeting strike drones. New drop zone, Section India Twelve, to prevent entrenchment by the so-called “Dune Worms.” 

Captain America, who had stayed out of the argument about vatches, came up on the comms next. “Guys, let’s push the perimeter around Thanos another fifteen-twenty yards back, if we can. I do not like the look of those flames or whatever they are. Anyone who can do energy absorption or containment, we could sure use you here in Foxtrot Fifteen, soon as you can get here.”

^^^^^^^^^

Loki watched Vision pluck his woman up and carry her off to the new perimeter, while Strange took to the air. Stark hovered in front of him. “You want a lift, Sneaky Smurf?” But at Loki’s head shake, the smith departed the scene entirely, making for some other hot spot. Loki meant to offer the Leewit a hand and teleport, but that meant he had to find her again, and when he spotted her his guts turned to water. The Leewit; fearless, impulsive, arrogant, _healer_ Leewit... walked up to Thanos and patted his knee gently.

Battlefields are noisy, and the Leewit still had no comm unit, so nobody else could hear just what the little witch saw fit to say just then. Loki was still close enough to see the Titan’s brows draw together in confusion or offense, but too far away to do anything useful. But Loki (and some few others, not all of them on Team StoneKeeper) _could_ pick up on the immense, lumpy, rose-scented words of Big Bossy the Vatch:

**CAAAN YOUUU HEEEEAR MEEE NOOOOW!**

Thanos looked up with a jerk that seemed less like a muscle spasm than like a slight skip in a record. But it seemed the Mind Stone had, indeed, restored whatever passed for memory among vatchkind. “You!” he shouted. “What kept you? You were supposed to help me!” An anguished note joined the anger. “I had to live through each and every one of those moments, _one at a time!”_

Big Bossy’s words grew spikier and somewhat yellow. **YOU COULDN’T RELL ME! AND YOU KEPT _MOVING!_ DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD IT IS TO HELP SOMEONE YOU CAN’T COORDINATE WITH?**

Loki edged in closer, fascinated, listening with only half an ear to the chatter on the comms.

_Iron Man to Command Three: I’m en-route to India Twelve to help with your worm problem. – What’s he mean, worms? Oh, the Nirdlaps? Hey, Rocket here: listen, Nirdlaps are easy. You just gotta blast ‘em with soundwaves; anything between a thousand and thirteen hundred Hertz’ll take ‘em right out. – Iron Man copies. Friday, play Ride of the Valkyries and let’s go kill the Wabbit. – That’s NIRDLAPS, not wabbits, what the hell is wrong with you humies? – Sector Romeo, report: do you need reinforcements? – Nay, good friend, the Men of the X and I are well-met in a most glorious battle against these boar-goblins! – Team Stonekeeper, be advised that Proxima Midnight appears to be en-route to your location, ETA, uh, now, I guess. Damn, she’s fast. Sorry about that, Cap._

The Leewit gave a sudden squeak and ducked between Thanos’ legs to hide behind him. The thrown spear vibrated in the ground just where she had been.

**YOU’RE WELCOME,** said the vatch.

“Roger,” the Captain groaned as he picked himself up off the ground again. “Stats on Proxima Midnight again?”

Loki panted for breath and tried to remember what he had been about to do with the Reality Staff. “Nearly strong as your Hulk, with enough poison in the tip of that spear of hers to slay a bilgesnipe,” he advised the Captain. “Vision? Scarlet? Are you able to do anything to her at a distance?”

“Assessing….” The golem made no move to adjust his current trajectory, and Loki feared that the assessment concerned, not whether Vision could do anything, but whether he wished to. 

^^^^^^^^^

All the fuss around him finally brought Thanos’ attention back to the present; a development Loki was not entirely in favor of. He laid one of his great violet hands on Proxima Midnight’s forehead, between the horns. “At ease, daughter.”

She obeyed, in the sense that she stopped trying to circle around him to reach the Leewit again, but she was far from mollified. “Who?” Proxima demanded, “Who betrayed you? Who promised to help you and then failed?”

Thanos smiled. None of the changes he had undergone in the last half hour served to make his smile any more pleasant. “Nobody you can touch, my loyal child, and it wasn’t a failure so much as … a delay. But it does not matter now; I have not been harmed. In fact, I have been enlightened.”

Proxima Midnight regarded this statement with entirely understandable dismay. She peered doubtfully into his out-of sync, flickering eyes. “Father?”

Thanos always did seem to enjoy explaining things. “The Stones,” he said, “are the keys to a much larger universe than I dreamed.”

Loki edged a few silent steps nearer, but also sent a double off to speak with Banner. “Are you able to pick up what the Titan is saying on my comm link? Or should I relay it? It sounds important.”

Banner, straightforward soul that he was, relayed Loki’s question. The answer came at once, accompanied by a background of explosions and opera music. _Gotcha covered, Blue Meanie. I planted a few bugs on the guy earlier under the cover of those strafing runs. Hey, Fri, pull up whatever we’re getting out of Operation Grapeshot and put it on channel A-3._

“Very well,” Loki acknowledged. His double nodded courteously to Banner and dissolved, and he went back to listening.

The Leewit, in the few instants his attention had been elsewhere, had emerged again, though she was, at least, out of Thanos’ immediate reach at the moment. “That’s right,” she was saying. “You thought the universe needed fixing because it isn’t your universe, so it felt wrong. And you thought you wanted Death because her country looked like the only way out.”

Loki wished the Leewit did have a comm, so that he could insist she get out of the way without shouting. Except she likely would ignore him, anyway, the stubborn, idiot child…

Proxima Midnight gripped Thanos’ elbow briefly, then pulled back sharply, shaking her fingers as though they burned. “Father,” she pled, “I know many fools who failed to understand your vision have called you mad over the centuries, but this truly is madness! The little human has corrupted your mind somehow!”

The Titan's gentle smile changed not one milimeter. “No,” he said patiently, “it is not. Already, four of the locks that kept me imprisoned have been opened, and now I can see the truth for myself.”

It was time, Loki judged, for a dramatic entrance. From where he stood, Loki shot a bolt from the Reality Staff at Proxima Midnight's spear where it still stood lodged in the dirt. In the red light, it grew and spread, becoming one of those peculiar knobbled trees that appeared here and there in the desert, with tufts of spiky leaves only at the ends of its branches. The tree was much larger than he'd been expecting – large enough that both the Titan and his daughter backed away from it a little in surprise. The amount of energy in the staff that had now been converted to matter must truly have been immense. And yet it had taken only a fraction of the power the Stone had used when acting against the other stones; it barely stung. Loki arranged his face into its most irritating smirk and it very nearly was not a lie.

“Yeees,” he drawled. “Let us discuss the two remaining locks, shall we?”

Proxima glared at him in fury, then peered at him in confusion. “I thought Father killed you,” she said suspiciously.

“I thought so too, at the time,” Loki told her, and waved a dismissive hand. “But we were discussing locks, and how it might be prudent to reconsider your acquisitions strategy.” He tilted his head back on his neck. It was not quite possible to actually peer down his nose at any part of Thanos north of his waist, but he could give that impression, and he pointed a single finger for emphasis. “Because, you dim excuse for a mystic, the locks of your cage do not appear to be reachable from inside it. You cannot turn the keys yourself! And that prison gang you call your family does not appear to be eager to assist you in your escape, if your daughter's behavior is any indication. And you grow less able to coerce me or my cohort with every passing moment.”

For a brief moment, Loki regretted the absence of a cape on his shoulders. He manged a sweeping gesture out at the battle just the same. Very little of it could be seen around the clouds of smoke and the fallen leviathans, but it hardly mattered. “Your communications are in disarray,” he announced, “your troops are being whittled away, and access to backup has been stunted by your loss of command over the Space Stone. Your very flagship is failing you. How, then, will you persuade us to help you in your quest? Why should Midgard not simply complete its capture and let it be known among the realms who it was that humbled the Titan? What will _you_ pay, not for the last two Stones, but for the use of them?”

The whole trumpeting speech was, of course, an outrageous tissue of exaggerations, obfuscations, and outright falsehoods. While the Blob Squad was working very industriously at sabotaging the flagship, it would take twice as many Yeeherak working for a month to truly neutralize it as a threat. The communications problems could be worked around, if Thanos put his mind to it. The slower speed of backup arriving mattered little when the numbers meant they could destroy Earth three or four times over whenever they arrived. And if Earth did prevail, a captive Titan, in whatever shape, was far too barbed a prize to mention to the galaxy at large. 

Loki fully expected Thanos to realize much of this; he was far too canny not to. But every moment spent parrying the lies, constructing bargains true or false, was a moment Thanos was not leading his army. Loki did not know what would or could be done with the time he was buying, but his instincts had moved him to open negotiations _now,_ and he had little else to guide him.

He was wholly unprepared for Thanos to reply, “Anything. I would give anything within my power. What do you want?”

Vision must have been listening in (of course he had been, to Loki and every other single comm unit on the field, most likely) because he used the few seconds Loki spent choking on his own tongue to summon the rest of Team Stonekeeper back to the near perimeter. Vision listened, always. Were the others listening too, or were they too busy fighting? What of the commanders of the other units? Loki cleared his throat.

“To begin with,” he said, “there is the promise another made on your behalf. Your fellow vatch assured us some time ago that if we aided their quest, that you would leave our realm entirely and cease to trouble it. I know you do indeed wish to leave this realm, but we would also have your own vow that, once gone, you will not return. You will not take any revenge against your erstwhile enemies on this plane, nor will you intervene vatch-fashion in any of our workings henceforth.”

Thanos did not immediately respond, but his daughter was more than willing to expostulate in his place, as, through the comms, was Stark. "OK, I don't think the last guy who tried to take over earth gets to be ambassador to the current one." 

Banner's voice came up next. "You wanna give the job to Ross instead? At least if Loki offers something we don't want to give, we have an excuse to refuse, later." Then Proxima Midnight decided to start threatening Loki directly and Thanos slapped her, almost absentmindedly. She drew herself resentfully to attention instead.

“You will notice,” Loki muttered at his kibitzing audience, “that I have not promised anything yet.”

“Am I interrupting?” Thanos sounded amused.

Loki settled his features back into blandness. “Not at all,” he said, “my apologies. Now. We were discussing the possibility of your acting in this realm as a vatch, and how there is none.”

Thanos narrowed his eyes at Loki’s tone, but nodded. “So I swear,” he said. “In the unlikely event that I can bring myself to play dream games again after… all this, I will do so in other venues. There is, after all, no shortage of them.”

The Leewit, who had (at last!) begun to back away, gave a sharp, satisfied nod at this. Loki took a breath.

“Next,” he said, “Withdraw your army from Midgard. Send them back to your ship, and send the ship back to its home port in… Titan orbit, is it? Our mages have no reason to deplete themselves on your behalf if they must spend energy defending their home.”

This logic, too, was utterly specious, since removing Thanos from this dimension was, itself, a defense for Midgard, but Thanos again chose not to comment. Either he chose not to address empty rhetoric or his increasingly vatchy mind failed to catch the flaws. The Leewit had claimed that vatches were not, generally speaking, very bright. The objections he now raised were wholly practical.

“Your people have done an excellent job of ensuring that I cannot contact my flagship at all,” he pointed out. “And the Space Stone is no longer at my command. Our exit will not be so hasty as our arrival was.”

“We are aware that moving an army is not simply a matter of snapping one’s fingers,” Loki assured him. (Thanos shot him an exceedingly dry look.) “The practicalities can be discussed.” 

Loki himself found the practicalities rather distressing. The most prudent course of action would be to have the wielder of the Reality Staff accompany the flagship on its retreat, releasing Thanos from its hold when they reached an agreed-upon bourne. Which would require someone: a) trustworthy, b) capable of wielding the staff, c) reasonably willing to undertake such a journey in such company, and d) capable of dealing with whatever trouble the Leewit caused when she inevitably decided she was coming too. Loki himself failed to qualify on at least two counts, and he didn’t know who else might not - Thor’s new friend the tree, perhaps?

Loki’s comm chimed, and Thanos, too, reacted as if he heard it. The smooth, bland voice of Agent Coulson (speaking of people who were supposed to be dead) announced, _Pirate Ship, here. For something like this, we can open up ground-to-ship transmssions for Thanos’ people again for a brief time. If you’re very nice to us, we may even consider giving exfil orders to the moles we have aboard your flagship._

Proxima Midnight flared her nostrils at this, as though she were planning to hunt the spies herself, possibly by smell. Loki wondered how long it would take the flagship to recognize that the beige conductive gel that smelled faintly of canned fish was, not only the evidence of sabotage but was, in fact, the saboteur. He did not imagine it would be a short time. Thanos quirked one corner of his mouth; he clearly had assumed there must be moles and was not deeply troubled.

Dr. Strange descended from on high to hover at a point near Loki’s right shoulder. “Kamar Taj might be willing to be of some assistance with the transport issues,” he intoned.

Thus ensuring that the units thus transported didn’t conveniently end up at the Alpha Century jump field, or any other useful place to regroup for a counterattack. Loki approved.

“You could help too, couldn't you?” The Leewit was suddenly at his side again. Loki didn’t have time to begin his usual lecture about What Wormholes Could and Could Not Do before he realized the question hadn’t been addressed to him.

**I MIGHT….** said Big Bossy.

The Leewit smirked. “Aw, c’mon! Think how much fun you could have! Just keep ‘em all away from Yarthe.”

Loki winced. _That,_ on the other hand, was the kind of open-ended bargain he’d been carefully avoiding. He raised his voice. “Be that as it may, Vatch-turned-Titan, a ceasefire is both possible and desirable. If you meant it when you said you would do _anything_ to restore yourself to your birthright.”

This time, Proxima Midnight tried being cold and imperious. “Do you really mean to abandon the quest you have pursued for millenia, the mighty people, the family you have built from a thousand worlds, for the sake of one bragging, jumped-up orphan?” The sneer she aimed in Loki’s direction was first-rate, he thought, but the tone needed work. Proxima’s myriad competencies did not include questioning orders.

Besides, she wasn’t the only one weighing in. **I HAVE HELPED YOU, AS YOU BEGGED ME TO,** the Vatch thundered, and Loki wished the non-magicians could hear it, if only so they knew why so many of their partners and enemies were flinching. **IF YOU DECIDE TO BE STUPID ABOUT ACCEPTING THE HELP I BROUGHT HERE FOR YOU, THERE’S NOTHING MORE I CAN DO.**

“Indeed.” Thanos straightened and planted his feet at shoulder-width. Doing so shifted Stormbreaker at his hip, and he seemed to notice it for the first time since he had taken it from Thor. “Here, my daughter, take this,” he said. “Since your own weapon is…” he eyed the new tree beside them, “unavailable.”

The warrior woman took the axe with both hands and a face alight with feral glee. “Yes, father! And who shall be the first to taste its blade? How shall we punish these fools?”

“Not needed at this time,” Thanos told her patiently. He had no need, it seemed, to physically activate his own communicator. Perhaps it was on a continuous feed, his luckless thralls required to hang on his every utterance. “Thanos to… ‘Pirate ship.’ Please open our other channels as you offered to do.” He waited only a few seconds before continuing, used as he was to instant obedience. “Thanos to all units. Thanos to all units. Execute Contingency Argon.”

Proxima Midnight shrieked in fury, clutching her new battleaxe. “No! No! Override! Thanos has been _compromised!_ We must avenge him! Contingency Sodi-”

“Thor!” Strange snapped, “Thor, summon Stormbreaker _now!”_ And in the next instant Thor’s axe was hurtling through the air toward its master, carrying Thanos’ daughter with it.

“Contingency Argon,” Thanos repeated steadily, “Now.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Loki had seen Thanos incinerate battle wagons, seen him cast off the Hulk like a half-grown puppy, had born witness to the wasteland that had once been the glittering planet Xandar. But nothing he had seen brought home the enormity of Thanos’ power so much as hearing those words leave Thanos’ mouth and watching the thousands of invaders react _instantly._

Clusters of advancing fighters reconfigured themselves and began to retreat. A good third of the ships in the air rose and vanished, while others swooped lower, opening loading bays rather than gunports. The golden spears of tractor beams began to pierce the clouds. Some of the myriad pieces of fallen equipment that littered the field ignited, or collapsed into dust, rendering themselves unsalvageable. Of course it wasn’t perfect. A retreat was not a surrender, and the troops being harried by Terran forces still returned fire. The Nirdlaps, the Hittons minks, the airborne Xreeli, and the other less-sentient species continued making trouble. If Proxima succeeded in rallying any of the troops to her counter-orders, the chaos would get worse. And, of course, there was no way to know how honest a game Thanos was playing. “Contingency Argon” might be code for, “back off long enough for everyone to get cocky and then come back and wipe them out.” But Thanos had never, in recorded history, given even a temporary retreat order when he decided to take a planet, and still there was no hesitation. Loki felt dizzy with awe and surprise and, probably, exhaustion. He wondered if he might plead with the ice-worker who had solidified him earlier for a repeat performance.

_Pirate Ship is no longer taking fire,_ Agent Johnson informed them all. _Topside forces are awaiting orders from Unified command: permission to cease attacking earth-bound vessels? If they’re playing fair it would speed up downside evac a lot._

Loki left them to it. Just this once, he was glad not to be in charge.

Dr. Strange clasped his shoulder. “Be ready to pull back the Reality Stone,” he warned. 

Loki blinked. “So soon? I would have thought the leaders here might require additional concessions and assurances, first.”

“Oh, they want ‘em all right,” the Leewit said with a grin. “But look at it this way: we free him now, that dope Ross gets mad. We wait until Ross is happy, and _two_ vatches get mad.” Loki closed his eyes in acknowledgment. 

And just then, as if to illustrate the point, Thanos raised his voice. “And will that satisfy you? Will you set me free now, and rid yourselves of me?”

“Only one thing more,” Strange answered calmly. “You must relinquish the Guantlet. Take it off. You can let it rest between your feet, if it makes you feel better. Oh. And ask the Soul Stone what it would require of you to earn your freedom from it.”

Thanos’ eyes narrowed. “You mean you don’t know already?”

“The Soul Stone is sentient enough to have some say in its own decisions,” Strange replied, unmoved. “And it is more likely to cooperate if we treat it with respect.”

Thanos heaved a crackling sigh and lifted his left hand. Only the pinky finger still glowed. He looked at it with concentration and said, “Well?” and then a moment later, “Really? That’s all? All right.” The Stone stopped glowing. The Titan closed the fingers of his right hand gently around the Gauntlet and pulled it off as easily as if he were plucking a berry from a branch. As Strange had suggested, he stooped to let it to the ground, and then re-positioned himself so that the Guantlet lay between his feet. He returned his gaze to the Sorcerer. “And now?”

“Yes,” Strange agreed. “Loki, Leewit, it’s time. Break the hold of the Reality Stone.”

Loki looked at the Titan, faded and crackling, craggy face full of longing and fear. He looked at Strange, tense and edgy. He relled vatch. “No,” he said.


	40. Exit Strategies

Strange's aura flared and he raised his hands. Loki clenched the Staff, moving it without thought into a guard position, but neither mage made any further move to attack the other. Strange could do all kinds of things to Loki, but he couldn't force him to wield the Stone. Only Vision could, and he, Loki thought, would not.

It was a bad time for surprises and a bad time for long speeches. Earth Defense Unified Command really only managed the “earth” part consistently. And while it was definitely better to have most of Thanos' troops in retreat, none of them were doing anything at all against the smaller percentage that believed Proxima Midnight. Even a few strike forces operating under Contingency Sodium could, if successful, be a quite effective solution to Earth's overpopulation problem. It was a bad time, but this was the only one Loki had.

He kept his voice quiet, and dead-level, Stark's comms could do their job. He would not try to outscream an entire war. Not now. “Hear me.” And hadn’t that ever been his plea, in throne rooms and torture chambers, to those he despised and to those he loved more than breath, to those he hoped to trick and those he wanted to save. “Hear. Me. 

“You want me to use the Reality Stone again. No, don’t interrupt. You want me to bring order to the embodiment of entropy, to force the countless glittering possibilities the Stone inhabits into one coherent beam, one choice, one fact. Or rather, to erase one fact: the fact of Thanos’ existence. Well, it’s possible. All it requires is holding to that demand in the face of all the burning power flooding through you, to ignore every other one of your desires save the one you would have guide the Stone, and to lose yourself, for a moment, in your purpose. It takes _will.”_

He lifted his eyes to meet the Titan's. The creature was too far gone, he thought, to feel guilt, or shame, had never truly been capable of compassion. He couldn't strike as deeply as he wanted with his words, but maybe, at least, it could understand this much: That it was Thanos' own actions that had brought them to this pass.

“And the being you would have me erase has broken my will before. Taken me when I was bereft and grieving and amplified my pain and anger to the point of madness. He has twisted my mind, has haunted my dreams, listened to my waking thoughts. The being you would have me erase destroyed the last remnants of my home and family. I believe, though I cannot prove, that his agents were behind many other enemies I have had to face. And I know that I am but one of the ones he has used thus. For every soul on your overpopulated realm, there might be a hundred other Lokis that the Titan has thus broken.

“You who demand this of me cannot wish him gone more than I – gone from this realm and this universe and my thoughts hereafter. But the Reality Stone requires that its wielder be whole of mind and will, and I cannot bring my whole will to banish the Titan when I know it will end his suffering. You don’t want me to use the Stone. Not like this. You want someone who is well used to keeping themselves in check. Someone whose enmity is less personal. You want Banner.”

“You coulda done that in about four words, you know,” the Leewit groused. “ 'I can't, get Hulk.' Easy.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “You would think so,” he said, “but it leaves so much unstated and this lot likes to argue about everything. The only thing more exhausting than trying to work with them is trying to fight them.”

“And also you like to hear yourself talk,” Strange added.

“And also I was raised in a civilized realm and understand that moments of grave import ought to be marked by eloquence,” Loki corrected.

The ground trembled in the rhythm of running footsteps. “OK,” Hulk panted, “how exactly do I do this?”

Loki lifted the Staff up to Banner’s waiting hand in a smooth, ceremonious gesture. “It’s a bit jarring,” he advised. “Brace yourself.” 

Despite the warning, the Berserker took hold of the shaft with a cautious thumb and forefinger, and then nearly dropped it again with a yelp reminiscent of a barking seal. Fortunately for him, the Stone must have accepted the creature’s profound wish that it _stop hurting_ as a direct order, because the light of the staff dimmed a little and Banner’s face eased. Loki wiped his own hands on his cloak. “Keep it simple and direct,” he said. “The Stone tries to seduce with the myriad possibilities that spring from each instant. Maintain your focus.” And then he stepped backward a few paces to join the waiting Leewit, because he did not wish to be targeted by any mistakes.

^^^^^^^^^^

That was the thing about surgical procedures and apocalyptic battles: no matter how many times Strange had done a particular one, there was always a chance that something new would crop up. This one had run off the rails when the Leewit diagnosed Thanos’ condition as 'dimensional exile', rather than straightforward mental illness. 

It was not, however, the first time he’d had to coach Dr. Banner in the uses of an Infinity Stone. When the Hulk repeated his plaintive, “But how? What do I do?” Strange stepped into the breach, using all the words he himself had found the most helpful when he was first trying to reconcile science and magic. “Think of it like a biofeedback machine, or a prosthetic that’s programmed to respond to neural impulses. Most of the ceremony in this stuff is a way of codifying the will and maintaining concentration. Loki’s right that you have the basics down already.”

Banner furrowed his forehead. “Single-minded,” he repeated querulously, and then, abruptly, smirked. “Right.” He planted his feet, shifted his grip and squared off at the Titan, his voice dropping to its lower registers and his pronunciation thickening. “BAD MAN GO ‘WAY,” the Hulk ordered, and the Stone flared. 

This was good information; Strange thought. This was the closest he’d gotten yet to a future that defeated the Titan and left Earth intact. He hoped he’d be able to go back and let himself know about it at an appropriate juncture once this iteration went tits-up and he had to start over. Cloak cuffed him gently on the cheek – meaning, probably, _pay attention._

The black flames around the Titan grew blacker and spikier, moving inward until the place where the Titan had been was a roiling, shapeless mass of flickering shadow, every part of it zapping inward and out again, save a pair of large, silvery eye shapes that held steady in the center. If he concentrated, Strange could sense the much larger, invisible reach of the roil’s outer borders, and, further out, the answering roil of the being the Leewit called “Big Bossy.” The Thanos-roil was expanding as it faded, though not to the immense reach of the other vatch; had the one always been more powerful than the other? Or was the smaller size of the Thanos-vatch a mark of the injuries it had sustained, trapped in the wrong reality? Perhaps there would be something in the library.

**I HAVE TO SAY I’VE WON THIS ROUND PRETTY HANDILY,** Bossy declared smugly. **YOU OWE ME A FAVOR AND A FORFEIT BOTH.**

**I suppose so,** the Thanos-vatch answered. **You certainly have the right to my pieces on this board, at the very least, since you can still play on it and I cannot.** The relling voice took on an oddly wistful note. **You’ll let me know if my erstwhile children do anything interesting, won’t you?**

**THAT’S A START,** Bossy agreed. **COME NOW – THE HULK WILL HAVE TWICE AS MUCH WORK PUSHING YOU OUT IF YOU DON’T HELP A LITTLE.**

**Right…** Strange’s ears popped, and then the blackness with the silver eyes was gone. Or nearly gone. Still the purple, garlicky voice sounded somewhere in his mind...

**This has been… interesting, beings of linear time. I have a new respect for your ability to solve these puzzles from the inside, having tried it myself. And I am most relieved that you finally solved this one and I can leave.**

Strange ticked seconds in his head as the voice faded, as the astral pressure of, as the Leewit put it, “relling vatch” reduced by nearly a third. Iron Man, who couldn’t keep the comms clear if his life depended on it, complained to no one in particular. _OK, thanks for ruining Studio Ghibli for us, asshole; I’m never gonna be able to look at a soot sprite again._ It was only then that it occurred to Strange that he might not have to start over again, that maybe this was the timeline where they won.

^^^^^^^^^

_Now what?_ Loki thought, watching Banner edge into the space the Titan had previously occupied. In the next moment he cursed himself for a fool, because now was always full of a thousand, a _million_ whats. The Titan was gone, and that was a victory worthy of every ballad and mural and tapestry and book that Odin had ever banned or burned, all put together. But that didn’t mean there was nothing to do. The Titan was gone, but four of his six children yet lived, and two at least remained loyal to his old cause. Thor lived; he would likely expect Loki’s support in whatever he planned to do next. The six Infinity Stones remained on Midgard, and the Collector knew it, and the havoc that could wreak for the whole of Yggdrasil did not bear thinking of. 

“Duck!” The Leewit screamed, and Loki dove out of the way of an attacking Xreelin, while the girl sent one of her whistles at it. Right. Also, they were still in the middle of the battle. The answer to _now what_ was still _try to survive._ Brutes were gonna brute.

“Are we done yet?” the Leewit called, and it took a moment to realize she was addressing the vatch, and not her companions, and that the question was not rhetorical. Because of course, the Leewit didn’t belong here; she belonged among the realms that had risen from the ashes of this one, somewhere on the other side of plagues and revolutions and revelations. She was living proof that the universe would carry on, somehow or other, and a people would rise who trusted each other as easily as breathing, and valued cleverness over might… a people whose magic and kinship systems were joyous, wild, improvisations. Given all that, there was no reason for the little witch to see _this_ battle out to the end.

**ARE YOU READY TO GO?**

Loki coughed at the sudden pink sensation of the words in his chest, and then glanced sideways at Strange, who didn’t react at all. Had the vatch’s question been … directed? And if so, was Loki meant to rell it, or not?

The Leewit frowned judiciously. “Oughta say goodbye first, I guess,” she said, “It’s only good manners. Strange, you think you could lend me your comm for a minute, if I promise not to whistle?”

“I’ve a better notion,” Strange told her, and vanished through one of his own portals.

A few moments later, another portal opened and Vision and Wanda stepped through. The Scarlet Witch immediately set up another of her bubble-shields around them, while Vision spoke to the Leewit.

“I can record a message for you,” he explained. “Please do try to be brief; we’re needed in Sector Quebec.”

“Right.” The Leewit’s throat worked, and she closed her eyes, then squared her shoulders and opened them. “OK, um. Everybody, I’m going now. Thanks for all you guys’ help with my mission; I’m pretty sure you’d all be counted Friends of Karres if, y’know, Karres was a thing yet. I hope I didn’t accidentally cause anything too horrible in the future and, um, it was nice meeting you. I’ll tell my sisters about you and then your names will be remembered hundreds of gigaseconds from now and that’s pretty neat, right? So, um, I hope stuff works out for you. Goodbye.”

She scowled fiercely and sniffed, then pulled her jacket more tightly around her. Loki, watching, felt the shift of astral pressure that presaged the Egger Route. He panicked.

“Wait!!” He reached out and grabbed the Leewit’s shoulder, too tightly, probably, and with too much cold radiating off his skin. “Take me with you!”

The Leewit craned her neck to look up at him, eyes narrow. Then she shrugged her other shoulder. “‘Kay,” she said. “Be ready to Egger.”

Loki winced. A thought struck him and he activated his comm a final time. “Someone tell Thor his brother says he’s not such a bad old dop-” and then they were gone.

^^^^^^^^^^

Bruce realized he’d lost the two allies nearest to him just when the invaders realized this little corner of Sector Foxtrot no longer held their commanding officer, and started to swarm. Leave it to those two, he thought as he punched through the shell of a wolf-sized arthropod, to stop Thanos with a minimum of convenience to anyone else. He dove under a swooping – a short-necked, long-tailed swooping thing-- and dove for the cast-off gauntlet. He couldn't let anyone else get to that.

“Could use some help here,” he grated, but the glowing red comet that was Vision and Wanda continued to fade away into the smoke. One of the Horsemen was in Sector Quebec, and so the invulnerable guy just got left to take whatever the local grunts could dish out.

The Gauntlet slid onto his left hand too easily, before Bruce was conscious of any intention to don it. And then his bones buzzed. Radiation sink though he was, the auras of four Infinity Stones in close proximity were almost too much for him. The head of the Staff grew heavy, the whole thing trying to twist in his right hand as the Reality Stone seemed to move toward its counterparts.

Bruce tightened his grip. “No!” he growled through gritted teeth, “You’re going back to the Collector when this is over. We made a promise!” The buzzing did not lessen. Bruce planted his feet and spread his arms. His head felt strange. Strange! “Strange!” he bellowed, “Vision! Stay back! The Gauntlet’s pulling at all the stones in range!”

He couldn't hear any reply over the thunder and shrieks of the fight, but neither caped figure was anywhere in sight, so Bruce supposed it would do. He lowered his tone a little and shifted comm channels. “Collector, if you can get a tractor beam down here for your goddamn rock, now would be a good time.”

Bruce’s anger was his own, now; the Hulk no longer brooded in the depths of his mind. But the Stones seemed to want to slide into the empty space where the Hulk used to lurk. _Use us,_ they sang, _we are power. We are desire. Use us and be mighty._

Bruce was well used to ignoring voices. He flipped the staff end-for end, gripping it just above the place where it flared out to hold the Stone, and whacked it against the neck of an approaching alien. The creature was instantly surrounded by a red mist, and Bruce leaped back, startled. He’d been trying not to use the stone’s power! But then, as the creature fell to the ground within the bubble, he heard the triumphant shriek of the Scarlet Witch. Oh. When had they come back? He backed away from her, not wanting to get within hexing distance and not wanting the Gauntlet anywhere near Vision. He ducked under a swing from another skeletal alien and headbutted up into its thorax, sending it flying.

“Tractor Beam Incoming,” the Collector announced over the comm. Bruce sprang up into the path of another swooper and jabbed the end of the Staff into its undercarriage. The Staff didn’t pierce the creature’s hide, but it must have done some kind of internal damage, because a moment later the creature’s belly swelled enormously and the thing burst in a gout of flame like a grotesque balloon. The golden light of the tractor beam pierced the haze, shooting toward the ground. Bruce leaned back and heaved the Staff like a javelin, watching it sail through the air and then stop dead when it intersected the path of the beam, then zip upward out of sight.

The next voice over the comms was Agent Johnson’s, squeaky with excitement but slow enough to be understood: “Time is eleven-twenty two, mark three hours, fifteen minutes since the first portal opened. This is your fifteen-minute info dump. Here’s what we’ve got now, heroes: Big Bad is confirmed out of play. He is gone and he is not coming back. Ground troops are divided between the ones trying to retreat and the ones trying for revenge. Confirmed all dead or retreating we have: the Chitauri, the samurai pigs, the lizard-people with the spines, the orange guys with the tusks, the fire dragons, the dune worms, and the mantis-heads. Confirmed still attacking we have: the acid-spitting dragons, the swarming weasels, the zombie pirates, the lizard-people with the neck ruffs, and the giant scorpions, The remaining Horsemen are all on Team Revenge, except for Nebula, who seems to have turned. She and Thor’s new buddies are engaging with Proxima Midnight in Sector Romeo. Also, Agent Johnson is totally jealous of the Collector’s language implant thingy that’s letting him eavesdrop on all the comm chatter. Does that thing work for humans, do we know? If we don’t know I volunteer as tribute.”

Two more swoopers wheeled away from where the tractor beam had been and made for Bruce. Iron Man appeared from somewhere behind Bruce and shot repulsor beams at both of them. One of them exploded. The other, merely singed along one wing, shrieked in rage and took off after Iron Man, leaving Bruce clear again. It wouldn’t be long, though. There were more ground troops heading his way, too many to fight one on one, and he’d sent his backup away to keep their Stones safe. He was going to have to use the Gauntlet.

For a moment, he was frozen in indecision. _Space, Power, Soul,_ he thought. The Soul Stone was the one Thanos wanted to use to kill off half the universe, but he’d needed the others to let it reach that far. Could Bruce use it to kill all their enemies on this field? If he killed everyone on the field, enemy and ally alike, was that a fair trade? The idea made him sick. He could open a portal with the Tesseract. To somewhere like… oh, the Juan de Fuca subduction zone. Or the Red Spot of Jupiter. But not even Thanos had been able to force people to go through the portals except by other means. Power.

Bruce grinned. He clenched his left fist and raised it in the air. _Power,_ he thought, and yelled, **“SMASH!!!”**

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It was like an hours-long Code Green, compressed into seconds. His vision blurred in a purple mist. There was a feeling of immense internal heat and pressure, which expanded into triumph and elation as he could, for once, let go, was the strongest thing on the field and knew it, was invincible and unbeatable. And then the wave moved outward, and Bruce had only the undertow. He fell to his knees, sick with exhaustion and terror. Nothing moved anywhere within a fifty-yard radius; the ground was littered with fallen bodies. What had he done? How many of those lifeless heaps had been allies? Friends?

A voice shouted in the distance. “Thor! Guard the Hulk!” Bruce shook his head dizzily. Whose voice had that been? Tony’s? Cap’s? There were too many baritones on the team, dammit. And hadn’t Thor been dead? No. No, he remembered that bit, at least. Thor had arrived, and Thanos had tried to kill him, and Loki had intervened, and then things had gotten a little busy. Now the last Asgardian streaked through the air, clinging to his new weapon that wasn’t Mjolnir, and came to rest a few feet from where Bruce knelt.

“Well played, friend Hulk!” the warrior greeted him cheerfully, “I believe you have turned the tide of the battle for us.”

The knots of fighting did seem to be fewer; only a few shapes seemed to be trying to breech the perimeter of fallen bodies around Bruce and Thor, and other shapes were preventing them. Bruce recognized the wheeling sparks of sling-ring portals. He took another breath.

“I’m pretty sure your brother and the Leewit had a lot more to do with it than I did,” he croaked. “They got rid of the Titan, after all.”

“My Brother?” Thor stiffened. For a moment his eye ceased sweeping the perimeter and focused entirely on Bruce. “Did I hear you aright? Was that truly Loki; the Jotun warrior who freed me from Power Stone’s grip and cast me from the Titan’s reach?”

Bruce nodded. He still wasn’t a hundred percent on exactly what had happened after that, but that much was true. 

Thor’s hand gripped Bruce’s shoulder, hard enough to bruise even the Hulk’s skin. “What happened after that?” he demanded. “Does my brother live still? Where is he?”

“Um.” Bruce cleared his throat and wiped a hand across his eyes. Was it his imagination, or had his skin changed color? A little more gray than green? Not important at the moment. “Well. Yes, that was Loki, and yes, he’s still alive as far as I know. Just… not here.”

“Where, then?” Thor’s eye was damp with unshed tears. “Tell me, I beg of you!”

“If it happened the way I think it happened,” Bruce said slowly, “He got transported into the future.”

“The future,” Thor repeated, confused. He looked out again at the battlefield. Things definitely seemed to be winding down out there.

“It’s… kind of a long story.” Bruce spread his hands and got distracted by the Gauntlet. He should take it off. Should he take it off? He thought it should go to the Collector, the one being they knew for… well, they didn’t know for certain that the Collector didn’t want to use the Stones, but all the signs thus far had pointed in that direction… but the Gauntlet was a bargaining chip… he hoped Tony was still alive. Or Rhodes. Or Natasha. Someone who knew how to use that kind of thing to advantage who wouldn’t want it for themselves.

“How far into the future?” Thor prompted.

“Oh.” Bruce thought back to the Leewit’s promises on Knowhere. “We don’t know for certain,” he said, “but somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen thousand years.”

Thor made a deep grating sound that might have been a sob.

“He had at least one friend with him,” Bruce offered weakly. His head ached, and he was hungry, and while the dizziness was passing off he still wasn’t sure he’d be able to stand upright.

“Sixteen thousand years...” Thor repeated.

“Yeah.” Bruce shifted. “So… maybe warn your grandchildren?”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Goth tapped her fingers thoughtfully against her lower lip. It was such a change of perspective, having her little niece Vala here on board with them. Vala wasn’t any younger now than she or the Leewit had been when they first went Roundabout, and they’d felt entirely capable of taking care of themselves at the time, but now Goth was only a little younger than Pausert had been when they met for… the first time, for her, the second for him. (Time travel was tricky that way.) And Vala seemed horribly tiny and vulnerable to be mucking about with vatches and nanites, to say nothing of whatever their passenger was up to. Goth did not trust Mr. Tivan, not one little bit.

“Aunt Goth!” 

And there was the little redheaded menace now. 

“Aunt Goth, come help! We gotta get this mattress out.” Vala had dragged one from an unoccupied passenger cabin as far as the doorway, where it had gotten lodged crosswise, just slightly too unwieldy for the little girl to be able to steer it. Goth checked the instruments again and decided she could spare a few minutes.

“Where are we taking it?” Goth reached out mentally and seized two corners of the mattress in a firm hold, steering them back into the cabin so she could grab the other end with her real hands.

“Bridge,” huffed Vala, tugging at one corner of the mattress and backing toward the door. “They’re gonna come in by Egger, but we shouldn’t wrap them the way we usually do.”

Hm.

“Premoted that, did you?” Goth inquired, setting another mental hand on the middle of the mattress so Vala could steer. She started to back out the way she’d come, the mattress following behind.

“Uh-huh,” Vala confirmed, tongue stuck between her teeth.

“Any idea who ‘they’ are?”

Premoting was tricky at the best of times, and Vala had come into the talent only recently.

“Nope.” Vala shook her head vigorously, curls bouncing. “I think it’s good, though. Mostly.”

“Well, I guess we’d better get them something soft to land on, then,” Goth said peaceably, easing the mattress down the corridor, but at the same time she 'ported the switch down on the intercom pickup and paged her husband in the engine room. Just in case.

Pausert stationed himself on one of the acceleration couches, leaning sideways against the back with his long legs draped over the arm in a way that looked lazy but wasn’t, his trusty Blythe gun tucked just out of sight, but ready to come up in an instant.

Goth, who didn’t need to be able to see her targets, slid bonelessly into the niche between the map console and the exo-suit pod. Vala stood only a few feet from the mattress she had carefully placed, arms crossed and foot tapping. Ta’Zara loomed behind her. Ever since the Leewit’s disappearance, he had appointed himself guardian of their little stowaway instead. All of them except Ta’Zara looked up at a sudden klatha surge, and then the sound began, a bone-buzzing thrum, both deep and high-pitched at once, that rattled the viewscreens and set teeth on edge. With a crump of displaced air, the Egger route disengaged and their visitors appeared.

The one on the bottom was bigger: a long, thin, figure in elaborate leather armor and a cloak, both so dark a green as to be nearly black. What little could be seen of his face and hands were a startling cobalt blue. He had wrapped his long limbs – aggressively? Protectively? around the smaller person who currently lay on top of him, thrashing in the usual post-egger spasms. The long blue one did not thrash, merely trembled in long, controlled judders and wrapped their arms more firmly around their companion, who bucked like an angry bollum. The little one wore some kind of hooded skinsuit and a dark jacket. After a surprised moment, Ta’Zara recognized the lines of the nose and chin.

“It’s the Leewit!” he cried, nearly melting in relief. “She’s back!”

Vala jumped and clapped her hands while Goth scooted back out of her hiding place and made for the mattress. Pausert neither relaxed nor put his gun away, not when they still didn’t know what was going on with the blue man holding his sister-in-law down, but his lips quirked into a grin nonetheless. “Well, now we’re really in trouble,” he said, but anyone who knew him knew he preferred it that way.

The post-Egger tremors faded as they always did. Goth thought the man came to first, and simply stayed there with his eyes closed, holding the Leewit until she had the wherewithal to elbow him firmly in the ribs instead of just jerking and flailing. The man let her go at once. She rolled off and sat up, rubbing her elbow, and looked around. She scowled at Vala, then sprang to her feet and offered a hand up to her companion, who looked at her dubiously a moment before accepting it. The Leewit cleared her throat. 

“Everybody,” she said, “This is Loki. We’re keeping him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And…. That's all she wrote. All your favorite people survive. The remaining bits of the Black Guard and the rest of the alien army provide exactly the right amount of drama. That one character you really hate dies/lives ignominiously. Your OTP has life-affiming sex. (If your OTP involves Loki, he made a deal with another vatch later and came back.)
> 
> Loki of Karres swings wildly between loving the sense of community that comes from being one “witch” among the many witches on Karres, and chafing at the sensation of being an order of magnitude less special than he's ever been before in his life. Even after extensive work with the mind-healers, he tends to fly off the handle on the Leewit's behalf whenever one of her family treats her like “the baby” or otherwise dismisses her. He thinks he's stepping into the role of Vodka Aunt. When he finds out Leewit is thinking “fiancee,” he panics, switches genders, and makes a play for the nearest inappropriate target (Sedmon. Or possibly the Collector. Or both.) Hijinks go up to Rumiko Takahashi levels and stay there for some considerable time, and I have no idea how they finally play out.


End file.
